The new Minister of Health, François Braun, gave details of the “filtering” device, planned for this summer in hospitals. While the emergency services denounce the lack of personnel and means, the minister explained that the patients will be sorted “by first calling the Samu”to direct them to “adequate care” and “when they go to the emergency room, they will be seen by paramedics who will be able to guide them”.
>> Emergency crisis: if the measures of the flash mission “work, we will extend them”, announces the Minister of Health
“I think the French will understand that when you have angina it’s better to go see your general practitioner than to go to an emergency service”, he justified. According to François Braun, this is “to avoid overloading our services” and “people who really need what is called the technical platform, can access it much more easily and not wait“.
Francois Braun (@fbraun55): “The French will understand that when you have angina, it is better to go see your general practitioner rather than the emergency room, to avoid overloading our services, and that people who really need them can access them.” #le69inter pic.twitter.com/vhhWcXK8IV
– France Inter (@franceinter) July 8, 2022
In an information report by the Senate’s Social Affairs Committee published in 2017, elected officials explained that the question of “unnecessary trips to the emergency room” was “a fake problem”. If the senators do not deny the existence of patients arriving at the emergency room “for convenience”they specify that this profile “remains, however, far from being in the majority”.
A report by the Court of Auditors had estimated, in 2014, that these patients could concern around 20% of emergency visits. But this figure should be taken with a grain of salt. As the Court itself specifies, this figure is based solely on the cases identified after an examination. “Some of these patients were nevertheless likely to present symptoms which, before the consultation by the emergency doctor, could raise fears of a condition requiring additional procedures or examinations”, they point out. Clearly, this figure does not allow us to say that coming to the emergency room was unjustified for 20% of people who arrived at the emergency room. Which makes senators say that “the notion of ‘useless’ passage itself appears difficult to define, if not a posteriori“.
The senators’ report also points to several upstream problems and cites a Drees survey carried out in 2014. The latter highlights a problem of access to city care: 60 to 70% of patients who come to the emergency room explain that their doctor attending was not there or they did not get a quick spot for further examination. Clearly, a majority of patients arriving at the emergency room simply have no other choice.
The report also mentions “services destabilized by the social emergency”. According to one of the doctors interviewed, if the medical emergency is not “not systematic”social gravity, on the other hand, is “increasingly frequent”. However, elected officials report “a societal evolution valuing the immediacy of access to care” with the existence of patients who “wish to get a quick answer to a health question”. However, this phenomenon appears “common to all Western countries, according to the OECD study”say the authors.
These trends, added to the aging of the population, largely explain the explosion in emergency room attendance. Visits to these services have almost doubled in 20 years. However, the information report did not call for a “filtering” patients but rather to “give emergencies the means to accommodate all requests”.
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