“We need strong political will, a real shock, and urgent measures”, alert Saturday, October 22 on franceinfo doctor Mélodie Aubart, neuropediatrician at the Necker children-sick hospital in Paris and signatory of a forum addressed to the President of the Republic by nearly 5,000 pediatric professionals. They denounce in this letter published in The Parisian the saturation of hospital pediatric services, degraded working conditions and unsuitable care, the results of a “irresponsible political inaction”.
franceinfo: You are sounding the alarm on the situation of pediatric services. Our children are “daily in danger”, you write in this letter. Why ?
Dr. Mélodie Aubart: What we wanted to explain to the President of the Republic is that we, every day, do our best to treat the children. This is what brings us together. It’s our job, but it’s not enough. Today, we denounce endangerment, insufficient care on a daily basis for children that we can no longer compensate. Our objective is not to panic the population. We live in a time when everyone is already nervous enough about the news. But in a society, children are the future. And if we are no longer able to care for them and take care of them as best we can, then there must be a strong political will. The president must take urgent action to change things.
How does this saturation of pediatric services manifest itself? Are you talking about transfers of Ile-de-France children to other establishments, sometimes hundreds of kilometers from the family home?
Yes, of course, and we are only at the beginning of the bronchiolitis epidemic. According to all pediatricians, it is a banal epidemic, and usual as we have known it for more than thirty years now. It is the background system which is much more unstable than usual, with beds closed in the intensive care units, in the downstream services and in the specialist services. So, today, yes, we are transferring children outside Ile-de-France several hundred kilometers to Orléans, to Reims. But these services are also beginning to be saturated. We keep children in cubicles all night in the emergency room, children who are only one or two weeks old. We have delays in taking charge of surgery, including banal appendicitis. And care for chronic diseases has not been provided for several months, as it should be.
The Minister of Health, François Braun replies that these peaks caused by the bronchiolitis epidemic are finally usual, that the transfers are done without danger, so there is no problem according to him…
We were very surprised by this speech by the Minister of Health last week. To say that these transfers were made without danger is not true. A 15-day-old child in respiratory distress several hundred kilometers away endangers the child and beyond that, it endangers the health system since a Smur team which transfer this child over several hours is no longer available in Ile-de-France to take care of the other children. We cannot say that a transfer is something trivial. All the adjustments we make today are no longer trivial and have real consequences for a growing number of children.
What do you think needs to be done urgently?
Reopen beds, of course. Me, I was very surprised after hearing the response to our letter from the director of the Regional Health Agency (ARS) of Ile-de-France. According to her, the situation is critical and she calls for responsibility.
“We are not going to put the country under a bell every winter, for a foreseeable epidemic, we are not going to start closing the crèches. We must recruit caregivers at the public hospital and in particular in pediatrics.
Dr. Melody Aubartat franceinfo
This requires that the meaning of our profession be put back at the heart of our daily work. So either you give up and leave, or you try to do more and you pull too much on the rope and finally you give up. This is what happened in the services and this is why there are no longer enough caregivers. We must also reassess the heaviness of care. A nurse cannot take care of 20 patients. This is not reasonnable. In addition, there is obviously a need for financial upgrades. Today, if we take in proportion to the average salary in France, we are among the last in European countries. Finally, we need a mode of hospital governance that is completely reassessed. You can’t manage a hospital like you manage a video game. Now, we need strong political will, a real shock, and urgent measures.