This is what the unions feared. Montluçon hospital emergency room (Combine) partially closed their doors to the public this Tuesday, May 31. Until Wednesday, June 1st included, only patients arriving by SAMU will be able to access the establishment. A decision taken by management due to the shortage of doctors in the public hospital.
“We did not expect this”, deplores Pierrette Guichon, president of the defense committee of the Montluçon hospital. At 69, the retiree fears not being able to access the emergency room if needed. “Today, you must not get sick. Don’t charge yourself a rib or a leg or anything ’cause we don’t know what’s gonna happen behind ! ”, protests the president of the committee. In particular, she fears overly long interventions in the event of an emergency, such as a stroke.
Three doctors instead of twenty
If the emergency rooms partially close their doors, it is because the doctors’ duty roster is empty. “For our emergencies to run normally, it would take 20 full-time doctors. However, today, we only have 3.5. The others left”, deplores Catherine Dutheil, nursing assistant at Montluçon hospital and representative of the Force Ouvrière union.
The emergencies are holding up thanks to the temporary workers. But they too are running out, recognizes the director of the Bernadette Mallot hospital. “We already had problems three weeks ago because we didn’t have enough emergency doctors. We had to call on the SAMU of Allier to redirect the patients”, she says.
But the director refuses to dramatize the situation. Some establishments operate daily in degraded mode. “We, it happened three days. It’s three days too long. But it’s not a month either”, nuance Bernadette Mallot. The management even assures that “except disaster”, she will hold the shock this summer.
Force install medic in medical wastelands
The mayor of Montluçon Frédéric Laporte appeals “in the sense of the responsibilities of physicians”. He thus wishes to oblige young graduates to come and settle in medical deserts. “I ask them to accept a complete reform of their profession and to accept being forced to go and work in desert areas as soon as they finish their studies. It must be done from the start of the school year in September 2022!”, insists Frédéric Laporte.
The mayor also explains that, from February 2022, he wrote to the President of the Republic and to the Minister of Health to alert them to the situation in Montluçon. In response, he says he only obtained an interview with an adviser to the minister. “At that time, he was already preparing the boxes for the one to come”, tackles the mayor, in reference to the recent change of Minister of Health. Not very optimistic, he now fears “the collapse of the health system in the coming months”.