Faced with another probably difficult summer in hospitals, due to the shortage of staff and leave, Pierre-Henri Guillet, head of the Romorantin and Bourges hospitals, details his doubts, his difficulties and the means at his disposal.
French hospitals are about to experience a new summer of difficulties. Like almost every year, emergency services will be regulated and beds will have to close due to staff shortages. Faced with these situations, hospital directors must solve real puzzles. Pierre-Henri Guillet is the director of the Romorantin and Bourges hospitals, in the Center-Val-de-Loire region.
>> “Whole services are closed”: caregivers denounce a situation at the hospital “worse than last year”
And he considers himself lucky: he, unlike some counterparts, managed to fill the schedule of the emergency department for the months of July and August. “It is an alignment of planets that means that we are rather preserved. In terms of emergencies, we only have two vacant medical positions out of a team of thirteen practitioners“, he slips.
A “alignment of planets“Very rare in France given the shortage of doctors and emergency nurses. 70 kilometers away, Pierre-Henri Guillet is acting director of the Bourges hospital, an establishment which employs 200 people: “AT hospital-wide, there are about 40 vacant medical positions”.
Guard lines may be closed
Despite this, we must give well-deserved leave to a tired staff. The hot spot, as in all hospitals, is the emergency department where, outside of holidays, there is already a shortage of 15 doctors out of 25: “For the medical staff part, we have completed the July call schedule. For this month, the call duty activity should be kept completely. We are working on the August schedule, and there we still have a certain number of holes to be filled”.
Pierre-Henri Guillet’s days are very long, as for all his fellow hospital directors. It is a real challenge to fill these holes, with incumbents who agree to work overtime, and with temporary workers, if they manage to find any: “We cannot work miracles. As a last resort, we may have to close one of our eight lines of care. In these cases, we close those who are least exposed, typically it can be the doctor reception and orientation, or the Smur 2 (Mobile emergency and resuscitation structures). It is the secondary Smur, the one that takes patients from one establishment to another “.
A headhunter position soon to be created
No miracle possible when there is a shortage of personnel in the emergency room, no miracle either for the rest of the hospital: “We will close around sixty beds in Bourges, which are essentially downstream beds for medicine and surgery. Closing a bed is really the last resort, it’s really something that we try to avoid as much as possible. There, it is a problem of personnel and leave, which obliges us to close these beds “.
If the directors of hospitals do not have the hand on the scales of remuneration which are decided nationally, Pierre-Henri Guillet wants to create at the start of the school year a post of responsible for recruitment. A kind of headhunter to attract caregivers: “We can no longer assume that the employer is in a position of strength in recruitment. It’s up to us to find the candidates rather than the other way around.
“The supply and the demand mean that it is rather the candidate who is in a position of strength, so we adapt.”
Pierre-Henri Guilleton franceinfo
Pierre-Henri Guillet is convinced that to attract caregivers, you also have to offer interesting work projects and improve the quality of work in the hospital.