The spokesperson for the Association of Emergency Physicians observes Saturday on franceinfo “a flight of hospital staff” and “a lack of trained personnel” in France, while the emergencies of Fougères (Ille-et-Vilaine) close for two nights.
Lack of hospital staff “results in deaths”, alert Saturday April 22 on franceinfo Christophe Prudhomme, emergency physician at Samu 93, spokesperson for the Association of Emergency Physicians of France (AMUF) and national CGT Health delegate, while the Intercommunal Hospital Center of Aulnay-sous-bois ( Seine-Saint-Denis) operates in degraded mode on the weekend of April 22 and 23, due to lack of staff. In Ille-et-Vilaine, the emergency rooms of the Fougères hospital are forced to close for two nights, due to a lack of staff.
franceinfo: What is the current situation?
Christopher Prudhomme: We were already in this situation in 2019 and nothing was done, on the contrary, the situation is getting worse. There is a flight of hospital staff, a lack of trained staff. The anger of the staff is monstrous. This lack of staff results in deaths, including in the hospital where the Minister of Health worked. [François Braun], in Metz. A 19-year-old girl died from lack of supervision. There was also a case in Grenoble.
“We have a case in my department [Seine-Saint-Denis] of a person who was discharged Friday evening from the emergency room and who was found dead Saturday morning at her home. It’s the patients watching each other from stretcher to stretcher.”
Christophe Prudhomme, national CGT Health delegateon franceinfo
Emmanuel Macron has promised to “relieve all emergency services” by the end of 2024. What do you think?
The statements of the President of the Republic have fueled anger. Affirm that we will have everything settled in 2024 when we have been asking him to listen to us for years and he does not listen to us. There needs to be a radical change of policy. How do you expect us to have confidence in Mr Macron when his record, since he became President of the Republic, is 41,000 closed beds and an increase in the Social Security budget for this year which is not up to inflation.
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Measures were made permanent during the summer of 2022, such as the use of liberal nurses, the increase in night hours. It is not a good thing ?
Liberal nurses are in the same difficulty as us. We do not regulate the installation of professionals with the freedom of installation. They settle in the heart of the city and abandon the suburbs, rural areas and small provincial towns.
What is the solution ?
It is to recruit and train by making these professions attractive, which is not the case at present. You will have to put in the money. We were sold everything on an outpatient basis, people no longer need to come to the hospital, we treat them at home. But in town, there are fewer and fewer general practitioners and they make fewer and fewer home visits. The measures of Mr. Braun, load shedding by calling 15 before coming to the emergency room, but at the slightest doubt we send a fire engine or an ambulance and the patients still arrive at the emergency room. Emmanuel Macron’s logic is that health is not a commercial sector. But health is a public service, it does not come under the commercial sector.