Comptroller again cites shortage in nurses, doctors, hospital beds

The comptroller’s report released today deals extensively with the lack in hospital beds and other medical equipment in hospitals, as well as a shortage of qualified nurses, saying that these faults in the health establishment pose a risk to the health of hospitalized patients.

“More than 500 patients are at a higher risk of dying due to a shortage in hospital beds,” the report charges.

Only 30% of positions for physicians specializing in urgent care were staffed, writes State Comptroller Yosef Shapira, and the lack is made up by specialist doctors filling in. The specialists, Shapira writes, “believe some patients die or become disabled due to misidentification of medical problems, due to a shortage of physicians specializing in urgent care.”

Subpar hospitalization conditions are also one of the main problems of the system, the comptroller writes, and these not only hurt patients’ privacy but can lead to infections. Shapira also mentions a shortage of patient clothes and hospital meals served cold.

His reports follows on the heels of numerous TV reports over the past years which showed elderly patients lying on hospital beds in corridors for lack of room inside departments, or departments filled with patients way beyond their stated capacity.

The report cites the deplorable state of internal medicine. Apart from doctors frequently treating 135-140% the number of patients they are expected to treat, there are three MRI machines for every million patients in Israel, whereas the OECD average is 14 machines per million patients.

The high quality of medical education in the country brings a significant amount of “medical tourism” – people coming from abroad to receive complex procedures at the hand of highly specialized Israeli surgeons. Somewhat ironically perhaps, “the service given to citizens of the state is hurt by giving medical tourism services in general hospitals. Medical tourism uses resources and infrastructure in hospitals which are under-equipped and intended, first and foremost, to serve the general population of Israel,” the report states.