Maxed Out
The Austrian government must get a grip on a crisis in the healthcare system that is testing the patience and goodwill of healthcare workers
Servus!
Austria’s two governing parties, the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Greens, have been holed up over the past couple of days in the Hotel Schlosspark in Mauerbach, a village in the Wienerwald a few kilometers west of Vienna. The coalition has been holding one of its periodic ‘retreats,’ a two-day summit at which the two factions meet with experts and try and hammer out their governing agenda. One would imagine this will be the final such getaway prior to new elections in 2024.
Several Austrian newspapers have tried to frame this summit as a fresh start for the coalition after a challenging 2022, a year which saw relations between the two parties undermined by the corruption allegations leveled at the ÖVP and difference of opinion over Europe and migration. As I wrote to you last week, corruption looks set to be one of the issues on the government’s docket for the coming year, and a finished proposal for a new anti-corruption law could be one of the outcomes of this retreat. The coalition is also expected to talk about a new freedom of information bill, developments in the European energy market, and the prospect of rising unemployment as 2023 progresses.
It would seem to me, however, that the coalition has a more immediate problem on its hands, namely a crisis in the healthcare system. Austria’s hospitals find themselves in a rather delicate, precarious state at present. Underlying problems are being exacerbated by a triple whammy of viral outbreaks. COVID-19 is one of them, of course, though active case numbers at present are in fact rather low. The bigger problem is the flu, with the City of Vienna logging over 30,000 new cases a week in the final weeks of 2022. On top of that, the respiratory syncytial virus or RSV is hitting small children particularly hard.
Throughout the winter, COVID-19, flu, and RSV patients having been landing in Austria’s hospitals, taking up beds in both regular and intensive care wards. This has led to capacity issues that have resulted in the postponement of scheduled operations and procedures. The introduction of these viruses into hospitals via outpatient clinics is also knocking out doctors and nurses, with staff absences due to contraction of COVID-19 or the flu another reason operations are getting delayed. Without staff to tend to them, some hospitals in Austria have also been forced to block off beds entirely, in turn exacerbating aforementioned capacity issues.
All of this is heaping further pressure on members of an already overworked and unpaid profession. Staff recruitment and retention has become a real issue. The urological department at the AKH, Vienna’s main hospital, has had to reduce its level of service due to shortages of beds and personnel. Two-thirds of doctors working in Vienna’s hospitals are said to be thinking about packing it in and looking for work elsewhere. Part of the problem is an old-fashioned 12-hour shift system that no longer works for people. Another is the nature of the Austrian healthcare system, which places the burden on hospitals to provide care, meaning services that could be contracted out—for patients with chronic ailments, say—are done in-house.
As American readers of this newsletter will be all too aware, a new Omicron sub-variant, XBB.1.5, has become the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States. The World Health Organization has described XBB.1.5 as “the most transmissible sub-variant detected yet”; in the northeastern United States, XBB.1.5 may account for 75 percent of active COVID-19 cases. The sub-variant has yet to reach Europe in any meaningful sense, and European health authorities do not anticipate it will have an increasing effect on the number of new COVID-19 cases “within the coming month.” Austria’s healthcare system, thus, has time to prepare for what may be the next wave of the pandemic. The question is whether it can.
Bis bald!
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