Despite a relentless recruitment campaign, the emergency department of Sélestat hospital is preparing to spend a summer under tension. The establishment faces – like many others – a chronic lack of emergency doctors. During the busiest summer days, it will have to accommodate more than a hundred patients.
The possibility of occasional closures
“We made massive use of temporary workers, all of our hospital colleagues in the medical departments, details the head of the emergency services of Sélestat, Dr Carine Pailler-Pradeau. On the strength of this, we have managed to make the schedules more or less consistent until the end of July, if no grain of sand slips into the cogs”.
Despite these efforts undertaken for several months, the emergencies of Sélestat lack practitioners for the period of August 15. “For emergencies to work, there must always be an emergency doctor on call, 24 hours a day”, says Dr. Pailler-Pradeau. In the presence of such a “grain of sand”, the service could then switch to “degraded mode”. “This means that at some point, 6 p.m., 10 p.m., midnight, depending on the workforce, the emergency room will have to be closed.” In the event of occasional closures of the Sélestat emergencies, the patients will be sent back to Colmar or Strasbourg.
I need emergency candidates and unfortunately, these doctors do not exist.
A situation that is nothing new that the Covid crisis, exhausting for the staff, has come to aggravate. It lacks the equivalent of four full-time emergency physicians to ensure correct and long-term operation from the Sélestat emergency department. The general shortage of emergency physicians is an impossible equation for the head of the department to solve. “I have almost no candidatesdeplores Carine Pailler-Pradeau. I need emergency candidates and unfortunately, these doctors do not exist. If they exist, they are already working somewhere and if they come to work in Sélestat, they will miss the establishment from which they leave.
To consolidate emergency services “from this summer” Emmanuel Macron announced “a one-month mission to find out the truth about prices on the subject of unscheduled careThis mission is entrusted to François Braun, head of emergencies at CHR Metz-Thionville and president of Samu-Urgences de France. “None of us has the magic formula. There are not enough emergency physicians who are trained each year, not even to cover retirements. Over the past few years, the number of emergency room visits exploded. We must train doctors and emergency physicians, this is a fact that we have known for years and decades. The flash mission will not change this state of affairs in any way.”says Dr. Pailler-Pradeau.