Experts speak of a missed opportunity. According to the then IC chief Gommers, the memo was not discussed in the OMT meeting of 27 February, in which RIVM also participated. “If even part of this had been discussed, I would have immediately raised the alarm. In the end, I did not do so until March 8, when I got a call from the European IC Association.”
Jan Kluytmans (now UMC Utrecht, previously Amphia in Breda) says he is “very surprised” about the memo. At the beginning of March 2020, he made his own calculations about the expected pressure on hospitals in Brabant.
“When we showed those calculations to the ministry, they fell off their chairs,” says Kluytmans.
What happened to the memo?
Bart Berden, director of the Elizabeth-Tweesteden Hospital in Tilburg, does not understand that the memo has not been shared. Amsterdam UMC board member Mark Kramer, as chairman of the Regional Consultation Acute Care North Holland/Flevoland at the time, intensively involved in the crisis approach, is also curious about the administrative route of the memo.
“For me, therefore, the big question is which office at RIVM or the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has stopped the formal progress of this memo and why that happened,” says Kramer. “This knowledge should have been introduced to the safety regions and the GGD GHOR. They could then have involved care partners, such as hospitals in their region, in preparations in good time.”
According to Berden, the patient distribution system LCPS could also have been started earlier. “I would have loved to have known this sooner. Then we would have been able to scale up and if healthcare institutions would have visited each other much earlier. I would have immediately purchased more personal protective equipment. Now the planes full of mouth caps went to China in February.”
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