A patient found dead on a stretcher in the emergency room of the Lariboisière hospital, twelve hours after her admission. This tragedy which occurred in 2018 led to the indictment in March 2021 of the AP-HP for manslaughter. What happened ? In this excerpt from “Complementary investigation”, here is the testimony of two members of the nursing staff present at that time.
“It’s a trauma in my professional life. The alarms, we’ve been ringing them, knocking on doors, and I feel like we’re being left to be tightrope walkers. It’s unbearable for me.” Barbara Coué has since left the hospital sector. She was then an emergency nurse at the Lariboisière hospital in Paris. She was the one who discovered Micheline Myrtil, 55, lifeless when she took up duty on December 18, 2018 at 6 a.m.
In “Complementary investigation”, she testifies for the first time – so that such tragedies are brought to light, as well as the working conditions in overvoltage emergency services, according to her. “We are used to deaths. What is abnormal is this wall that we find ourselves confronted with, with decisional silence, where people no longer exist”, she denounces, still very moved years later.
“There’s a stack of stretchers, we’re on ‘Tetris’…”
As she walks around the waiting room that morning, she notices “that there is someone who does not react” : a patient lying on a stretcher in a corner of the room, whose face, turned towards the wall, is not visible.
Suffering from fever and headaches, Micheline Myrtil had entered the emergency room the day before, at 6.40 p.m. It was a Monday, “a very, very complicated day in the emergency room, where there is more activity because people are coming back from the weekend”, specifies another caregiver present that evening, who testifies anonymously. There are so many people that in the waiting room, the“stack of stretchers” prevent you from seeing from the outside what is going on there.
6 hour wait time, understaffed
That evening, according to the caregiver, the waiting time to be seen by a doctor was six hours, instead of the regulatory 120 minutes in cases considered “semi-emergencies”. According to the report from the health authorities, the doctor on duty was alone to manage the “thirty patients waiting in this sector”, an influx making it “impossible to quickly identify patients to prioritize in care”. The same document notes a situation of understaffing compared to the other Public Assistance hospitals, themselves below the recommendations (23.5 full-time equivalents in Lariboisière, when 32.4 are needed according to official recommendations).
Three days after this death, which the administrative language modestly qualifies as “unexpected”, an additional nurse would have been hired to monitor patients in the waiting room. Other positions would have been created later in Lariboisière and in all the emergency services of the Public Assistance, affirms the director of the AP-HP, interviewed by “Complement of the investigation”. Concerning Micheline Myrtil, he evokes the trail of an error of identification: the patient had been considered as absent because she had not answered the call of her name, recorded in an erroneous way. The prosecution is asking for a trial to shed light on this case.
Extract of “When emergencies no longer respond!“, a document to see in “Complementary investigation” on the 1st June 2023.
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