“It’s a real poison that disorganizes teams,” analyzes Frédéric Bizard, president of the Health Institute

Increase in the use of temporary work at the AP-HP: “It’s a real poison which disorganizes the teams”, analyzes Frédéric Bizard, the president of the Health Institute

The use of temporary workers in the health field is “a real poison that disorganizes teams”, analysis Thursday May 2 on franceinfo Frédéric Bizard, professor of economics at ESCP Europe and president of the Health Institute, a research organization dedicated to the overhaul of our health system. In one year, the use of temporary workers in Parisian AP-HP public hospitals jumped by 26% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period of 2023, France Inter revealed on Thursday.

“As we have been doing for years with our health system, we are attacking the symptoms and not the causes, so we have capped temporary worker salaries at 1 390 euros for 24-hour on-call, we had a Valletoux law which prohibited paramedical staff at the start of their career from doing temporary work, but all that is just addressing the symptom and not the causes of the crisis at hand. public hospital”fumes the professor, who instead wishes to tackle “the governance of hospitals, which must be remedicalized, career development, continuing education” to resolve the crisis. According to him, this drastic increase in the use of temporary workers shows above all “the deterioration of the working environment at AP-HP and in all public hospitals”.

A “systemic” impact

The use of temporary work is “a real poison that disorganizes teams, it creates tensions” due to the significant salary gaps between permanent employees and temporary workers. For nurses, remuneration can go from simple to double, while temporary workers “have many fewer obligations, choose when they want to work, which creates deep inequality within institutions.”

And this recourse has a very high cost and absorbs part of the budget of hospitals, which thus absorb 44% of the health insurance budget, but only “to survive, and not to develop, to invest” he laments, “and all this at the expense of prevention, community medicine and nursing homes, so we see that it has a systemic impact”.