“It would be nice if there were a miracle,” say caregivers, without really believing it.

Franceinfo surveys the French and their expectations of Michel Barnier’s government. On Tuesday, the floor is given to health workers, one of the “priorities” of his government.

While the name of the future Minister of Health is not yet known, we head to the hospital, a sector in crisis for years, and more precisely that of Nemours, in Seine-et-Marne, where both caregivers and patients are disillusioned. Under a grey and rainy sky, staff morale is as gloomy as the weather. “That’s 33 years that I work here. They closed departments. The first was the maternity ward. Then it was the operating theatre. Since there was no more theatre, they closed the surgery and orthopedics” explains a stretcher-bearer.

This nursing assistant also has the impression of a hospital that is crumbling over the years: “There are no resources. When you look here at what we are already working with… There is nothing. Lack of equipment, lack of personnel, lack of doctors, lack of everything.”she sums up.

So what do these caregivers expect from the next government? Not much, especially after this statement from Michel Barnier, during his first visit on Saturday, September 7 to the Necker hospital in Paris. : “We’re not going to perform miracles.” However, health is one of the “priorities” of his government. He thus wished in front of the press “that rapid progress is visible in the countryside in the provision of care (…) at the same time as we continue to work to make the hospital function better, with the staff.” The fact remains that the preparation of the Social Security budget, whose deficit is widening, has been delayed, while the health sector is suffering, between an underfunded public hospital and an emergency crisis. Several projects aimed at reducing the medical desertification have been halted, such as a reform of the nursing profession or the experiment of direct access to specialist doctors.

“It would be nice if there were a miracle, retorts the nurse, But do miracles really exist? ? When you are given more and more responsibilities, more and more task shifts and then in relation to that, you are told ‘go ahead, figure it out yourselves’. More task shifts, that doesn’t mean a pay rise for all that.”

Salaries that are not high enough, a lack of recognition, this explains the current crisis of vocations, according to Valérie, a nursing assistant: “We say ‘civil servant’, but what are our advantages? ? Job security ? But when I see that there are some hospitals that are closing because there are no more beds, there are no more doctors, there is no more of all that, I am not even sure that we still have it.” She cuts the exchange short because she has work.

Indeed, the day is busy, we have to take care of patients, like Liliane, who came to have an X-ray: “We’re the ones who pay the price, for care and everything. It’s a circus now to get appointments, there are no more doctors and on top of that it takes extra fees. Those we go to see, we’re no longer reimbursed. So we wonder if we’ll be able to get treatment again. And then there’s a shortage of staff too? It’s always the same.” And Liliane expects nothing from a future Minister of Health, “but with them there is no problem”, she said. “If they are sick, these people will have the means to treat themselves. That’s what annoys me.”

The next Minister of Health will be the sixth appointed since the start of the five-year term, just over two years ago.