in the emergency room of the Orleans hospital, the cry of distress of the caregivers on strike

In the emergency corridor of the Orleans hospital, in the Loiret, calm has reigned for several days. Nothing to do with the usual atmosphere. “You have to imagine stretchers all along the wall, sometimes to the right and to the leftsays doctor Mathieu Leroy, emergency doctor. You can barely move around, there is noise, people are calling… And there, it’s empty.”

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Before being almost entirely closed for lack of personnel, the emergencies reached complete saturation. The white plan has been triggered. It took up to three to four days of waiting on stretchers before being hospitalized in the wards, which puts patients at risk. “In studies, it is shown that when someone stays on a stretcher for days, their clinical condition automatically worsens”, continues the emergency doctor. And it is this situation that made the nurses and paramedics crack. “It creates a huge mental load for our caregiversexplains Aline Cassonet, health manager.

“They feel like they’re not doing their job well, they’re being inhumane, they’re being abused.”

Aline Cassonet, health manager

at franceinfo

Caregivers “already come to work with a lump in their stomach, and then they leave even more with a lump in their stomach, even crying”laments Aline Cassonet. “We come to conditions where they have maybe 20, 25 patients in their sector whereas in a hospital service, the quota is one nurse for ten patients.”

This observation, the director general of the hospital, Olivier Boyer, shares. He too is lucid about the crisis that the emergency room is going through. “We don’t take good care of people, that’s clearrecognizes the director. There are caregivers who have told me that patients die on stretchers, not necessarily because they were not taken care of.”

“Often, the end of life happens in the hospital and it is true that it does not happen in dignified conditions.”

Olivier Boyer, general manager of the hospital

at franceinfo

Olivier Boyer explains this deterioration by the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting recruitment problems. “The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the difficultyhe justifies. As we do not have enough nurses – we are short of 90 nurses – we have 150 beds out of the slightly over 1,000 short-stay beds that are closed. And so, with 150 beds closed, all the latitude we have to hospitalize people as quickly as possible, it falls to the ground.

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Negotiations are underway with the Regional Health Agency (ARS) for a crisis resolution protocol: the goal is to no longer exceed 48 patients treated in the emergency room. In the meantime, only absolute emergencies are brought to the Orleans hospital by the Samu.