The spokesperson for the Association of Emergency Physicians of France and regional adviser France insoumise d’Ile-de-France, Christophe Prudhomme, estimates Wednesday on franceinfo that the “flash mission” launched by Emmanuel Macron will constitute a “umpteenth report“. The president of the Republic “try to push the deadline beyond the legislative elections with yet another report”, according to the paramedic.
franceinfo: How can this not be just one more report on the hospital?
Christopher Prudhomme: The diagnosis is known. I am an emergency doctor, when the diagnosis is known, the treatment must be administered as quickly as possible. There is no need for an autopsy in this case. Emmanuel Macron is largely responsible for the current situation. The difficulty today is that the staff are leaving the hospital, the Ségur has absolutely not met expectations. What encumbers emergencies today are the 20% of patients who have to be hospitalized and for whom there is no bed. However, all hospital restructuring projects provide for the elimination of beds. For five years, including in the midst of the Covid epidemic, beds have closed, 17,000 have been closed in five years. All this is known. In 2019, we were already in the street, how to be heard today when Emmanuel Macron is trying to push the deadline beyond the legislative elections with yet another report.
Do you think this report will be useless?
I know Mr. François Braun, in charge of writing the report and president of Samu-Urgences de France, we mix genres. He represents a professional union, he was health advisor to the president, he sold us the healthcare access service at the beginning of the year. How can we have confidence in his proposals?
What do you think should be done?
It is essential to keep the emergency services open. I work in a Samu, if we ask patients who do not have access to emergencies to call the Samu, the Samus will explode. When the standards are cluttered, a call for cardiac arrest, if it takes 10 minutes to pick up, it’s a disaster. We really need to be heard, we must immediately fill the schools with students who will be on the ground within a year for nursing auxiliaries, in three years for nurses, and for doctors, the work is shared among all physicians, that is to say that the obligation of on-call duty must be re-established for all physicians. If the workload at night, on weekends and on public holidays is spread over all the doctors, we will be able to pass the course by 2030, still hoping to have more doctors available by then. Which may not be the case: this year, 10,000 students are entering medicine, we have not abolished the numerus clausus so that makes 10,000 students who will be doctors in 2030, it is the same number as in 1975. At some point, the President of the Republic must stop being in denial, listen to the field and not try to permanently push back the real debate.
How do you envision the summer period for the emergency services?
It’s going to be catastrophic. We are going to submit a report at the beginning of July, but now is the time to make decisions. Why can’t we find night nursing staff? The night bonus for hospital workers is 1.07 euros gross per hour. We don’t value the night. We have between 150 and 200,000 working-age nurses who have left the profession. One of the causes is the loss of hardship which allowed caregivers to take advantage of early retirement, this has been lost. Today, the objective of restructuring in hospitals is to eliminate days of RTT, it is to ask staff not to take more than fifteen days of vacation this summer as Martin Hirsch did [directeur général du groupement hospitalier d’Ile-de-France] for the hospitals of Paris. How do you want the system to hold up? It is not possible.