Quel a été l'impact de la pandémie de Covid-19 sur les performances financières des hôpitaux généraux belges ?

Abstract

The Covid’19 crisis that arise between 2020 and 2022 has been very impactful on Belgian’s economy and a lot of companies suffered from this situation. With the different obligation that were given by the Government, some shops have been forced to close their doors to people and even the population was being forbidden of doing a lot of activities and of being together. With all the people that were sick, the hospitals had a key position in dealing with the virus and in doing is job of Public Health. As the situation was critical, hospitals were overwhelmed. Finance is at the center of every organization, so, we can reasonably ask ourselves what the impact of such a crisis on hospital’s financial health has been. In this paper, you will be able to consult an empirical study done in two different ways that aims to answer this question. Firstly, you will encounter a financial analysis done on hospital’s financial statements that compare the results from different years. And, secondly, interviews with people involved in hospital’s financial management during the pandemic have been conducted. By combining a literature review with these two empirical works, we discovered that the financial impact of the pandemic on hospitals was fluctuating depending on hospitals situation and specificities. Thanks to Federal advances, no hospitals encountered liquidity problems, but they faced challenges linked to a global loss in revenue and to exceptional expenses. The solvability is not as good as before. The casual investments encountered no problems but there was sometimes a delay for big architectural investments. The human resources expenses increased but not as much as if every overtime had been paid. The results from this work can be compared to the results from the MAHA press release. We can see that some results are similar, but this is not the case for every subjects. To summarize the answer, we can see that some hospitals really suffered from the pandemic by a financial perspective but there is also some that have a situation that is, on the paper, better. There are some impacts like the level of activity that has not yet returned to the level of 2019 but the impacts are not as much important that we could think, especially thanks to the Federal advances that helped a lot the hospital’s liquidity.