On the front lines of the virus, close to hospital services

Since the start of the health crisis, health journalists have gone from reporting in hospitals to interviewing doctors. In two years of uncertainty and contradictory injunctions, the priority is to deliver the most reliable information possible. Tara Schlegel, reporter for France Culture, returns from a report at the University Hospital of Angers.

After two years of crisis, nurses and hospital staff are tired, focused on their tasks, and if during the first confinement, they easily opened the doors of their services to journalists, weariness ended up winning the ranks. No particular animosity, but the question of relevance.

At the worst of the crisis, in intensive care, it was necessary to alert, to plead the lack of means, the saturation, the energy expended. There was no doubt a pedagogical will. Bring to the attention of the general public what the services endured, the dangerousness to death, and the need to protect themselves, to be more attentive to the arguments of the medical profession.

Today, the facts are known, they do not prevent the belief in eccentric theses which are propagated on the networks and sometimes plague the public debate. Most doctors believe that their place is with the teams and their patients. If there is misinformation, it is up to journalists to remedy it.

Since March 2020, Tara Schlegel of France Culture has conducted many interviews with infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, department heads. Recognized experts in their fields who avoided superfluous projections and spoke very factually about known, analyzed and reliable data.

The health crisis has obviously accentuated the structural problems that the health sector was experiencing before the spread of the virus. And Tara Schlegel had a glimpse of it only in the demonstrations of the white coats, when exasperated, they responded to the call of the unions to mobilize.

In the microphone of the journalist from France Culture, we heard exhaustion, cries of alarm and the reporter could only trust what she heard. By entering the immersion in the University Hospital of Angers, Tara Schlegel realized to what extent the testimonies collected were not a figment of the mind.

By assisting in particular in the holding of the crisis unit of the hospital, she saw the heads of department – not only the administrative – redouble your imagination to find solutions to the lack of beds, everything that came with postponements of operations, programmed for other pathologies, they had to be considered as a last resort, and as for the height of the crisis, it was not there was no choice, we had to act fast.

And when Tara Schegel’s microphone stretches out, somewhat like a coffee break, the words are released. She will not forget this young nurse recruited two and a half years ago. That is six months before the start of the crisis. With the first confinement, the patients who arrive die for the most part. We run, we do what we can to save, and death, often, too often, strikes. It’s part of the job, but a priori, she did not choose this specialty so far rub shoulders with death. And it is by saying it, by formalizing it that she cracks, that tears escape.

That’s also what an interview is for. Eliminate the overflow of tension among those who are mobilized on the front of the virus and who chain days, nights, emergencies.