Hospitals in Flanders recorded their first-ever loss last year, as rising labour costs and high inflation put the Belgian medical sector under increasingly severe financial pressure.
According to an analysis by De Tijd, hospitals in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region posted a net loss of €30 million in 2022: a staggering decline relative to the last two years, when they registered net annual earnings above €150 million.
The study also noted that since 2011, annual profits in the Flemish medical sector have averaged around €100 million and have never dipped below €50 million.
Margot Cloet, Managing Director of Zorgnet-Icuro, an umbrella organisation which represents Flemish hospitals, expressed serious concern at the scale of the decrease.
"Even in years of savings, there was never such a drop," she said. "The financial noose is being tightened more and more."
A pessimistic prognosis
Both De Tijd and Cloet added that generous government subsidies have done little to mitigate the impact of rising energy costs on the Flemish medical sector over the past year.
In total, Flemish hospitals received €39 million in energy subsidies in 2022, while energy costs surged by nearly double that amount, reaching €67 million. Worryingly, Cloet forecast that hospitals' energy bills will nearly triple to €162 million this year.
Increasing labour costs were also reported as another key factor underlying Flemish hospitals' poor financial performance. Antwerp-based ZNA, the region's largest hospital, saw staff expenditure grow by €42 million in 2022.
Rising labour costs, in turn, are largely attributable to government-mandated wage indexations as well as increasing medical staff shortages. With just 324.8 doctors for every 100,000 inhabitants, Belgium has the second-lowest proportion of doctors in the EU after France.
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In a recent interview with La Dernière Heure, Laurence Hody, the chief nurse in cardiovascular surgery at Saint Luc University Hospital, explained that staff shortages are mostly a result of insufficient medical school enrolments.
"For ten years, the situation has deteriorated and we are not seeing many students applying and arriving in schools," Hody said. "On the ground, colleagues are suffering and we are no longer able to teach the job properly to students on an internship...we are dying in silence."
Hody's concerns were echoed by Evelyne Magerat, a former nurse and current representative of the Confederation of Christian Trade Unions of Belgium (ACV/CSC).
"Many people have resigned which has increased the workload, and there are not enough students coming out of school to fill the gap," she said. "It is a vicious circle that aggravates the situation in hospitals."
The De Tijd study also appears to have confirmed the prescient predictions made last year by Belfius Bank, which reported that high energy and labour costs had created a "very tense" situation in Belgium's medical sector that "promises to be even more problematic" in 2023.
