Paris
France’s first official investigation into the deaths of thousands of elderly people in this summer’s heat wave blames hospitals. A government report released this week charges that health authorities let too many doctors go on vacation in August. As a result, hospitals and nursing homes inundated with heat-stroke victims were left badly understaffed, and more than 11,000 senior citizens succumbed. Doctors protested that they would have come back to work if somebody had phoned them. “The problem wasn’t that everyone was on vacation,” said Michel Combier, head of a physicians’ union, “but that the alert system was too weak to allow for hospitals to get everyone back working.” The French government is now considering scrapping one of the 11 annual national holidays and using taxes from the extra workday to finance care for the elderly.
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