On the heights of a village in Savoie, this specialized reception center has everything to ensure its residents, mostly autistic adults, the calm and serenity they need… But it lacks the essentials : the staff, which should be twice as many. Excerpt from a report by “Special Envoy” in a medico-social sector out of breath, which now has 50,000 vacancies.
On the road to the Col du Granier, it offers a magnificent view of the Chartreuse massif. At L’Orée de Sésame, a specialized reception center managed by the Sésame Autisme Rhône-Alpes association, everything is done so that the 35 residents, adults with autism, Down’s syndrome or pervasive behavioral disorders (PDD) feel at home.
The fifteen permanent employees of the establishment know by heart these fragile patients, whom the slightest change disturbs deeply. To take care of them in good conditions, there would have to be at least twice as many of them… but resignations and sick leave follow one another, to the point that establishing a schedule has become almost impossible. A caregiver for twelve years, Céline remembers “hard times, when there was a lack of personnel for stops, things like that, but we always managed to bounce back, she says. There, we can’t do it anymore. Not at all.”
“And yet, when there are the staff, things go really well!”
The operation of the reception center today relies solely on the energy of the employees who are still there – like Marie-Laure, a regular volunteer overtime worker. A vicious circle, because the work overload also exhausts them. Without counting that in understaffed, managing the crises, sometimes uncontrollable, of the residents proves to be even more complicated.
A year ago, such a situation was unthinkable for the director, Etienne Michon. In twenty-four years of career, he had never known anything like it. For him, what he has faced since June 2021 looks like, “in a way, to ‘the big resignation’ in the medico-social sector, with a whole bunch of professionals who left the sector, who left to do something completely different from the medico-social sector”.
Due to a lack of supervision, the activities offered are becoming rare. The accompaniment is deteriorating every day more. Unprecedented at this point, the shortage of staff puts these handicapped residents, who require a lot of time and attention, at risk. At the time of the filming of “Special Envoy”, Etienne Michon had resolved to announce to the families that he had to part with nine of them, whom he no longer had the means to take care of.
Excerpt from “Seeking caregivers desperately”, a report to see in “Special Envoy” on April 13, 2023.
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