This is a problem that affects a good part of the hospital structures in France: the lack of state-certified operating room nurses. A shortage that sometimes leads to reports of operations in hospitals. At the Toulouse University Hospital, several positions are vacant.
Forty vacancies
State-certified operating theater nurses, or IBODE as they are known in the medical community, have very specific missions : they are often considered as the third hand of the surgeon. They check the compliance of medical records, install sterile drapes, check the infusions and devices that will be used during the procedure. They also give the surgeon the instruments he needs and serve as a relay between the sterile area and the non-sterile area of the operating room. State-certified operating room nurses have two more years of training than their generalist colleagues and therefore a bac +5 level.
According to the management of the Toulouse University Hospital, there is currently a shortage of about forty operating room nurses who graduated from the State last month at the University Hospital. For Grégory Chakir, spokesperson for the Inter Blocs collective “Inter Bloc collective”, which campaigns for better recognition of this IBODE specialty at the CHU, this national shortage is largely explained because salaries do not follow : “At the start of a career, if we compare the salaries of a nurse in general care and a nurse specializing in operating theaters, with the Ségur agreements, there is a difference of €16 net. On a personal level, I earn just over €2,000 net per month, which is not very high after 15 years of experience. It’s a profession subject to pressure: we have no room for error. There are also physical constraints: you sometimes have to stand and concentrate for 5 or 6 hours for certain operations. When operating room nurses realize the low salary differential with generalist colleagues, they do not stay: either they resign and reconvert, either they _become liberal.__”_ The organizations and unions of operating room nurses are asking for salary increases of 300 to 400 euros gross per month.
According to Grégory Chakir, this lack of IBODE “results in postponements of interventions and it is extremely serious. The healthcare system in France is collapsing and the operating theater is directly impacted by this degradation of care.”
3% of operations postponed in October for human resources issues
The management of the Toulouse University Hospital affirms that the phenomenon is marginal: in October, 180 operations were postponed, but only 3% for reasons of lack of staff or absenteeism: the vast majority of postponements would be linked to the patient’s state of health.
However, the lack of state-certified operating theater nurses is an issue that the Toulouse University Hospital claims to take seriously, according to Ornella Bruxelles-Terriat, director of the Toulouse University Hospital’s operating theater department: “We arrive by working, among other things, on the schedules to ensure that there are very few postponements of interventions.” But the hospital wants to facilitate the recruitment of block nurses by facilitating the training of general nurses who already work at the CHU. A dozen nurses enter training every year. Facilities are also provided for IBODES who apply to the CHU in terms of accommodation and places in a crèche.