the addition of “an economic situation which is not our responsibility and an abandonment of the State”, according to the Inter-Hôpitaux collective

The president of the medical commission establishing Public Assistance – Hospitals of Marseille calls for “a Marshall plan for the public hospital”.

On Monday, the managers of the 32 university hospitals in France asked the government for “emergency measures after announcing facing a cumulative deficit of 1.2 billion euros at the end of 2023”. An amount that has tripled in the space of a year. For Jean-Luc Jouve, president of the medical establishment commission of Assistance publique – Hôpitaux de Marseille (APHM) and member of the Inter-Hôpitaux collective, the situation is due to the addiction of two factors: “the accumulation of an economic situation which is not our responsibility and an abandonment of the State on its public hospital”.

franceinfo: Why such an outbreak, such a deterioration in barely a year ?

Jean-Luc Jouve: There are several factors: the surge in inflation, the upgrading of part of the salaries of caregivers which was established by Ségur and which is done with a certain parsimony however, and then there are also beds that we have not been able to reopen because, despite patient waiting lists, we have staff, particularly nursing staff, who have not joined the hospitals. So all these factors combined mean that revenues are less important and that we have a little abandonment by the State on what is currently happening in the public hospital. We have left the ‘whatever it takes’ of Covid and we have returned to a level of medicine which is that of 2019, with a level of excellence and technology which is major in being able to treat all people with the level we have. So we are all in deficit almost equally in the 32 university hospitals in France.

This is a situation, in financial terms, which has never been seen since the beginning of the Fifth Republic. ?

Exactly. There is the accumulation of an economic situation which is not our responsibility and an abandonment of the State on its public hospital. I think we can use this term because we are a little bit the toys of economic manipulation which means that we have announcements which are a little bit false announcements, like that of the Prime Minister who announces 32 billion euros for the public hospital when this is already money that has partly been used. We have 800 million euros that health insurance was supposed to give as part of the national spending objective, but as we have closed beds, it recovers this money and we, in the meantime, are in debt to the point that even sometimes, we have difficulty paying our suppliers on time.

The measures taken by Ségur de la Santé were not financed by the State?

First of all, the measurements are not up to what one might expect. And there are positions in which there is an acute need for work to be valued correctly, notably night shifts, particularly weekend shifts, and this too is done sparingly each time, when we really need a Marshall plan for them, for the public hospital. If we want to maintain the quality of our medicine, the quality of care that we offer, as in all the most medicalized countries in the world, and that we offer to everyone, I believe that we must State hears this message of Marshall plan for the public hospital.

Does this delicate financial situation jeopardize the future in terms of investments and new equipment?

Completely. For the moment, we are in a situation where CHUs manage to maintain a very high quality technical platform, such as for example in my case at the Marseille CHU, but we do not see how, if the situation persists, we will be able to maintain the maintenance, the change of equipment that we need, but also on a human level, maintain the attractiveness for the youngest among us of a medicine which is an exciting medicine but which requires time, which consumes energy. fatigue among caregivers who feel little help in this aspect.