Israeli government finds healthcare system plagued by serious failures on October 7th

Inability of Israel’s healthcare system to cope with October 7th invasion points to serious need for preparations for mass casualty events, warns Health Ministry.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Health Ministry released Monday an interim report on the way the healthcare system reacted to the Hamas attack of October 7, finding fault with many aspects of patient care and management as a whopping 1,590 people sought emergency medical treatment on that day.

“Most of the injured arrived for treatment independently,” Ministry Director-General Moshe Bar Siman Tov wrote as part of what was termed an “update” to hospital and health fund directors throughout the country.

This was due, he wrote, “to the military nature of the event and the absence of an on-ground authority responsible for creating a situational overview, including injury assessments.”

As a result, “no single entity had a full picture or control over the allocation of medical and evacuation resources in the field.” This meant, among other things, that there was no prioritization, to ensure that the most seriously wounded casualties would be taken first.

There was also lack of coordination between those trying to get the injured out of the battle zones because of “confusion regarding authority and responsibility for managing the event.”

The ministry’s unit officially responsible for managing mass-casualty events was also simply not prepared for a disaster of such proportions, he added.

There were problems at the hospitals receiving the injured as well.

The vast majority of victims went on their own or were taken by friends and strangers alike to the nearest medical centers, Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva and Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon.

Because of this, there was no coordination in the chaos and “no significant effort to direct patients to more distant hospitals.”

This meant that while two hospitals were overwhelmed, others in the center of the country, which had staff and operating rooms ready to treat patients, mostly stood idle.

The report did include praise for the heroic actions of all medical and ancillary staff in all medical organizations in responding with alacrity and devotion to a scenario they had never practiced before.

The update contained a list of recommendations to better prepare the healthcare system in case of future medical disasters.

These included subsuming all first-responder groups under Magen David Adom so that evacuation efforts could be coordinated by one body, instituting a direct line of communications with the army regarding activity in closed military zones, and requiring that in emergencies, all hospitals inform the relevant authority what their casualty capacity was and list those who had already arrived at their doors.

As for the ministry itself, the report suggested structural changes to its control center and improving its information systems so it can better manage highly complex and large-scale events.

The report was written by a team led by  Prof. Nachman Ash, the previous director-general of the Health Ministry. It does not preclude the possibility of a state commission of inquiry investigating the healthcare system’s performance at a future date.