In the midst of an emergency crisis and a few days before the legislative elections, hospital staff mobilized little on Tuesday, June 7, to demand salary and staff increases. For this first day of action of the second Macron five-year term, nine unions and groups of caregivers organized rallies in at least fifty cities.
But the mobilization has not been full, as noted by AFP journalists. Thus in Paris, between 200 and 300 demonstrators found themselves in front of the Ministry of Health at the start of the afternoon. Including Corinne Panot, caregiver who came from Méricourt (Vosges) to remind us that“Beyond salary increases, it is above all human resources that we need”.
They were about as numerous in Toulouse, where Hélène Isus, a nurse at the CHU, explained that she wanted “to do (his) job properly, not having to choose between patients”. Same crowds in Grenoble and Nantes, where child psychiatry nurse Ronan Tréguer was exasperated: “It’s been a mess for years and we’re fed up. Our working conditions are deplorable and the patients are suffering”.
In Bordeaux, among the few hundred gathered in front of the CHU at midday, Lise, an operating room nurse, said she was tired of having to “always do more with less time and personnel”. “There is a lot of professional fatigue, we are called back on our days off”underlined Noëlle, nursing assistant at the Rennes University Hospital, where a hundred people marched from the University Hospital to the regional health agency (ARS).
It is in the emergency room that the fire is smoldering: for lack of caregivers, at least 120 services have been forced to limit their activity or are preparing for it, according to a count at the end of May from the Samu-Emergencies association in France. Its president, François Braun, must also submit the conclusions of the “flash mission” by the end of June to the Head of State, who promised in an interview with the regional press on Friday “emergency decisions from July”.