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Graphic Truth: Hospital bed decline
They made their bed – and were forced to lie in it.
At the start of the pandemic, G7 countries were plagued by a huge uptick in hospital admissions – and the shocking reality that hospital beds had been on a 50-year decline. Four years later, these countries have still not reversed the downward spiral.
In the US, over the last five decades, care has shifted away from inpatient hospital settings and to outpatient services to cut costs. The decrease has also been intentional. In 1974, the government began an initiative to directly cut the number of hospital beds, believing in a rule calledRoemer's Law, which said that “a hospital bed built would be a hospital bed filled,” thus driving up costs.
However, the US’s free-market healthcare system still provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated system in Canada. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Ontario has just one intensive-care bed for every 800 residents, giving it no surge capacity. Michael Decter, the former chair of the Health Council of Canada told theCBC that because Canada’s system is public, “we tend to ration everything.”
Across the G7, governments have reduced hospital capacity to cut costs and because advances in medical care have decreased the amount of time patients spend in hospitals. However, older people – who are more likely to spend time in hospital – are also taking up an increasing share of G7 populations. The result is higher wait times, lower surge capacity, and worsening patient care.
Attacked by ransomware: The hospital network brought to a standstill by cybercriminals
In October 2022, the second-largest nonprofit healthcare system in the US, CommonSpirit Health, was hit with a crippling ransomware attack. Kelsay Irby works as an ER nurse at a CommonSpirit hospital in Washington. She arrived at work after the malware had spread through the hospital network to chaos: systems were down, computers were running slowly or not at all, labs weren’t returning results, and nurses were charting vitals on pen and paper. Even basic things like knowing what medications patients were on or why they came into the emergency room were a challenge, putting lives at risk. The hospital’s nurses and doctors scrambled to manage this crisis for over two weeks until CommonSpirit Health was able to restore access to the IT network
“It was just kind of this perfect storm of very sick patients, not enough help, everybody was super frustrated,” Irby says, “My biggest fear during the whole cyberattack was that a patient was going to suffer because we couldn’t access the technology.”
GZERO spoke with Irby about her experience during the ransomware attack, as well as cybersecurity expert Mora Durante Astrada from Zurich Insurance Group for the final episode of “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs: The Human Impact of Cyberattacks,” a new video series on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute. Astrada volunteers for the Institute and its CyberPeace Builders Program, which provides free cybersecurity assistance, threat detection, and analysis to NGOs and other critical sectors while advocating for safety and security in cyberspace.
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