L’hôpital public face à la crise de la Covid-19

A few months after the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic in January 2020, some lessons can be drawn from the health care management of the virus, particularly on the capacity of the hospital system to cope with this shock. Parliamentary reports and independent evaluations have been commissioned and published, and although the unpreparedness of the health authorities has been strongly denounced regarding the management of masks, personal protective equipment and detection tests, a consensus seems to be emerging: the health care system has been put to the test, but it has held up well and has been able to cope with the influx of patients thanks to the exceptional mobilisation of the nursing staff and unprecedented adaptation efforts both within hospitals and in town medicine, which has made rapid progress in teleconsultation. Far from discussing these observations of the first wave of the epidemic, I propose here to examine the precise conditions of these adaptations, and what they reveal about the capacity for reform, in the longer term, of the organisation of care.