Documents obtained by Mediapart show that during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic earlier this year France's ambulance service SAMU was slow to help some patients in urgent need of treatment because it was deluged with emergency calls. This organisational problem in turn led to reduced survival chances for some patients. Health experts fear that the ambulance service has not learnt the lessons from the springtime Covid crisis and that the same problems could reoccur during a second wave of the epidemic this autumn. Pascale Pascariello reports.
The peak of the Covid-19 epidemic earlier this year exposed the failings of France's ambulance service SAMU and potentially reduced the survival chances for some severely-ill patients, a Mediapart investigation reveals.
