The jurisdiction sums health establishments to set up a system of counting of the hours worked, in order to comply with European regulations, which limits the weekly working time at forty-eight hours.
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The decision was expected. On June 22, the Council of State decided: public hospitals must set up “a reliable, objective and accessible” system allowing to count the hours of work carried out by interns and hospital practitioners.
Three unions of doctors and internal, the National Intersyndicale of Interns (ISNI), Practitioner Action Hospital and young doctors, had seized the Council of State to oblige the Government to strengthen the regulations in force concerning the limitation of the time of Work at forty-eight hours weekly. In their viewfinder: the calculation system provided for by the public health code (half-days).
A request rejected by the Council of State, which considers that the law, in the current state, already implies “necessarily” that public health establishments have “a reliable, objective and accessible device allowing to Decount (…) The daily number of working hours worked by each agent, in order to ensure that the duration of his actual working time does not exceed the regulatory ceiling of forty-eight weekly hours “.
A rejection which, however, has the value of “victory” for the ISNI. “We consider this decision as one of the most important for the health community for fifteen years,” reacts its president, Gaetan Casanova. According to him, it could force establishments to completely “rethink” their organization, while “40 % of hospital staff are interns”.
anxiety and exhaustion
For the Council of State, it is therefore not the regulations that are to be reviewed, but its application. Because the texts already limit the working time to forty-eight hours weekly, divided into half-days, and calculated over the average of three months for the interns and four for hospital practitioners. But in fact, they work much more.
2020 , interns work fifty-eight hours per week on average. And 10 % of them even exceed seventy-nine hours. A problem with which students and union representatives have alert for years.
Three-quarters of medical students suffer from anxiety, and almost 67 % are in a professional exhaustion, according to the results of A survey of October 2021. in 2014, already, the European Commission summarized France to comply with the legislation fixed by the European Union and by a 2015 decree relating to the working time of interns. The former Minister of Health Olivier Véran promised, on the occasion of the Ségur,” financial sanctions “at regard to establishments that do not respect the regulations. A promise renewed in 2021, after a series of student suicides at the start of the year. “Every eighteen days, an intern in medicine committed suicide”, then alerted the isni .
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