As in Britain, healthcare systems across Europe are teetering under increasing pressure from winter illnesses, with no country protected from the effects.
The symptoms are often the same — crowded waiting rooms, too many people flocking to accident and emergency and shortages of beds exposed by an outbreak of flu.
Even high-tax Sweden is in the grip of a debate over staff shortages while flu is stretching Germany to breaking point and has triggered emergency measures in France to keep services going.
Germany
Last week in Munich, 15 of the city’s 19 hospitals reached capacity for emergency care, sending ambulances to shop around for empty beds. There have been evenings when no A&E departments in the city were open for admissions. Acute patients were not turned away but hospital staff reported “very tense” scenes as patients with flu were treated in corridors when protocol dictates that they should be isolated.
Germany prides itself on its advanced healthcare system, where patients are trusted to take themselves to specialists without the need for a referral, but crowded waiting rooms at GPs have caused a growing problem.
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A study this month said that between a third and a half of the 8.4 million patients a year who go straight to hospital should have been treated by a GP or other doctor. This could lead to penalties for those who routinely head to A&E.
France
The network of state hospitals is “cracking up” amid a flu epidemic that will affect more than one million people this winter, said Christophe Prudhomme, delegate for the health branch of the Confédération Générale du Travail union.
With A&E departments reporting a 30 per cent increase in cases because of the epidemic, many patients were left on stretchers in corridors for more than 24 hours as staff searched for beds.
François Braun, the chairman of France’s national paramedic service, said some A&Es, like the one at Lille University Hospital, were so overworked that patients were being forced to wait outside in ambulances.
Marisol Touraine, the health minister, has urged the 850 public hospitals to postpone non-urgent operations, with at least 192 of them declared “under tension”. This means they can implement emergency measures, such as putting several patients in single rooms and requisitioning off-duty staff.
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Three have introduced the draconian “white plan”, which is designed to cope with disasters such as terror attacks and means that patients not at immediate risk of death can be sent home.
Critics say the health crisis results from cutbacks, with the number of beds in public hospitals falling from 392,644 in 1981 to 256,061 in 2011, the last year for which reliable figures are available.
Italy
Ambulances routinely remain parked idly outside hospitals for hours, unable to respond to emergencies — a situation not helping a flu crisis.
Drivers say that when they drop off patients, emergency ward staff wheel them inside on the ambulance’s trolleys, asking the drivers to wait for the patient to be transferred to a bed before their trolley can be returned.
This week Il Messaggero newspaper counted five ambulances outside Rome’s Umberto I hospital as drivers waited to retrieve trolleys. One union calculated the city’s ambulances spend 50,000 hours a year waiting when they could be answering emergencies.
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Sweden
The healthcare system has been understaffed and under-resourced for years. Most experts agree that it is not equipped to handle a serious crisis.
“The situation is acute for just about every hospital with an emergency service in Sweden, regardless of where you look. Everyone from north to south is operating on the edge,” said Sineva Ribeiro, chairman of the Swedish Association of Health Professionals.
“Never before in Sweden have whole departments been run by external staffing companies. There is a higher turnover of staff than ever before. There are emergency wards where the longest-serving employee has been there four or five months.”
A pregnant woman died recently in the emergency room of a hospital in Gothenburg. The healthcare watchdog is investigating whether a lack of beds was the reason why she was not moved in time.