“A sad feeling of working at the factory”, the emergencies of the Orleans CHR remain on the verge of general burnout

In the emergency corridors of the Oréliance clinic in Orléans, a young woman is writhing in pain on a stretcher. The doctor then rushes to examine him. Problem: next to her, there are a dozen patients waiting. “Usually, we don’t have that at home“, regrets Doctor Xavier Della Valle, the head of emergencies at this private clinic, who has just completed 36 hours of call.

The influx of patients threatens his entire department. “The patients are irritated because they are taken for a ride, they are aggressive… Our reception staff are frequently subjected to aggression: verbal, every day, and physical, from time to time. Today, all the teams are exhausted”“, he describes.

This is exactly what happened two months ago, a few kilometers away: teams on the verge of burnout, like at the Orleans hospital center where there are too many patients and not enough nurses.

>> “Patients were dying on stretchers”: in the emergency room of Orleans hospital, the cry of distress of striking caregivers

Marc De Matos has been working in the emergency room of the CHU for ten years. At the end of March, he broke down and went on sick leave, like most of his colleagues. “Almost a sensation, on returning home, of working in the factory. When you are a nurse, a caregiver for more than twenty patients, you are no longer human. My sad record was 26 patients. We are very pessimistic about the future. If, in one or two months, we come back under the same conditions, we will leave. We will protect our own health“, he indicates.

Today, he has returned like almost all the nurses and orderlies in the service, but he does not believe much in the solutions proposed by management to find beds and relieve emergencies. For his part, the director of the hospital, Olivier Boyer, recognizes that this will not be enough in the long term: “Given the inadequacy of the healthcare offer, which is much greater in Orléans than elsewhere, with an order half as low as in an equivalent large city, all these measures will not be enough.s”, he slices.

The director of the CHU d’Orléans has promised to close the emergency rooms again in the event of an overflow, and now the doctors are demanding guarantees from management on the measures proposed to find beds and relieve the emergency rooms to end their strike.