“Doctors don’t need information overload”

Professor Exadaktylos, as the director of the department of emergency medicine at Bern University Hospital, you have firsthand experience with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. How well would you say hospitals in Europe have been responding to this crisis?

Aris Exadaktylos: We were caught off guard in February 2020 because we didn’t think the Covid-19 epidemic would develop into a pandemic. I would say we were relying too heavily on experience with previous epidemics like the avian flu, swine flu, or MERS, which were relatively mild for us in Europe. When a large-scale outbreak appeared in northern Italy, some of the hospitals there were totally unprepared. You might compare it with having a hand grenade explode in your hands. Other countries at least were able to make use of the head start and prepare for the upcoming wave of patients. In just a short period of time, we in Bern shifted from a controlled system with parallel tracks for elective and emergency procedures to something resembling a wartime scenario. But that also meant we had to do a lot of improvising.

If there’s one department that really needs to be prepared, wouldn’t it be the emergency center?

Exadaktylos: Over recent years, emergency departments in Switzerland and the rest of Europe have seen an enormous increase in the number of patients. They treat people with life-threatening injuries and conditions, and are also visited by all manner of what we might call “community medical” cases. These include people with drug issues, or psychological problems, or those who have minor injuries but no general practitioner to go to. Even under normal circumstances, the organizational work connected with all these cases is a challenge. That’s why all the hospitals with well-structured emergency centers are now in a better position to handle a pandemic like the one we’re seeing. After all, patients with heart attacks or strokes or life-threatening injuries still have to be treated, just as they were before the coronavirus appeared.