The Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regional health agency announced Friday, December 17 on France Bleu Provence that it had carried out patient evacuations, to free up places in the intensive care units. At least three transfers have already been made, specifies on franceinfo Jean-Luc Jouve, president of the medical establishment commission of the AP-HM, the Public Assistance of the Hospitals of Marseille. Also a member of the Inter-Hôpitaux collective, he warns about a situation “extremely tense” in the Bouches-du-Rhône, with “intensive care units that are full”.
franceinfo: How many patients have been transferred?
Jean-Luc Jouve : There, we transfer three patients and we think we can transfer a few more, knowing that the main difficulty is often opposition to the transfer. And each time it is very difficult to explain to a family that we are going to send one of theirs to Brest in an extremely critical condition. So these are transfers that are commendable but very difficult to manage. Especially since all of France is affected by the disease at the moment. We are not at all in the configuration of the previous waves, where there were regions almost untouched. So there is little room for evacuations.
Does this mean that in your area the resuscitation services are already saturated or are these preventive measures?
It is not preventive. Resuscitation services are full in the Bouches-du-Rhône. AT Note that it is also in the Bouches-du-Rhône that vaccination coverage is the least good in France. So there is still a parallel to be drawn. We deprogrammed everything that was not urgent in terms of surgery and medicine, and we are sorry to the non-Covid patients. We appeal to the private sector and to solidarity so that they too deprogram and so that the Regional Health Agency sends us colleagues from the private sector to come and help us. We are in an extremely tense situation.
It is the start of the school holidays. We imagine that a number of caregivers have taken leave. How are you going to do in the next two weeks in your hospitals?
Everything will be done not to encroach on the vacation of a nursing staff who is completely tired. This will be the last limit. And I think that if the health agencies help us deprogram, impose identical programming at the level of liberal structures, requisition people thus freed into liberal structures, to strengthen hospitals, we will not have to do it. We must respect the rest of the caregivers. They can’t take it anymore, they are on their knees. And it won’t be over in January. They must be able to be operational in January. So the strategy is that.
The Prime Minister announced that a bill will be presented in early January to transform the health pass into a vaccination pass. Is this measure going in the right direction?
Yes, that seems to me to be a step in the right direction, insofar as there is no question of stigmatizing people who are not vaccinated. We are not there at all. And we can understand that there is an individual freedom. Now we are in a situation of collective responsibility. That is, when you don’t get the vaccine, you put people around you at risk of death. This is the message that must be conveyed. That there is an obligation, if we want to have a social life, to have a complete vaccination schedule, it is the only element that we have that is effective against the disease, even more than the containment measures.