Small but nimble: measures taken to face the COVID-19 pandemic in small French military hospitals.

Abstract

To describe a complete panel of actions of the Service de Santé des Armées (SSA) (ie, French Military Health Service) that together contributed to prevent French health system saturation during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Observational retrospective study. Actions taken by military practitioners in the Parisian military hospitals, which contained 500 beds, to fight COVID-19 were listed and described. The Parisian military hospitals were fully reorganized to offer 147% more intensive care unit beds and took care of 665 inpatients with COVID-19 while continuing their core mission of war-wounded military care. A strategy to prioritize the use of medicine and medical devices was designed to avoid shortages. Field intensive care unit deployment and airborne collective medical evacuation by the SSA's MoRPHEE system avoided hospital saturation. Key facets of this achievement were interunit collaboration, esprit de corps, and health workers' adaptability. Small hospitals can provide a coherent answer to the COVID-19 pandemic, as long as they organize and prioritize the patients' care.