Since 1968, medical emergency calls for shipping ships tricolor pass through this “Samu de la Mer”. Doctors diagnose and give instructions to treat, confuse a ship for assistance or evacuate a patient.
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It is a small room that does not look like much, nestled in the heart of the University Hospital Center (CHU) in Purpan, in Toulouse. It just includes three computer screens, listening helmets, a planisphere hanging on the wall and some journals evoking the navigation that drag on a desk. However, in this building called Louis-Lareng (1923-2019), named after Toulouse professor creator of the Samu in 1968, the medical cases of all French navigators, or sailing under the French pavilion, of the globe.
Every year, the Maritime Medical Consultation Center (CCMM) receives more than 6,000 calls. Created in 1968 and formalized within the Samu of Haute-Garonne by inter-ministerial instruction of April 29, 1983, relating to the operational organization of medical aid at sea, the service, permanent and free, ensures consultations and telemedical assistance For crew members, passengers or simple occupants of the ship.
“Emergency medicine teleconsultation, but also general medicine and specialized medicine, is based, in addition to clinical data transmitted by the head of care on board, on the remote transmission of medical data such as digital images, Videos or electrocardiograms “, specifies the unit manager, Professor Patrick Roux.
“bobology”, anxieties, fractures, notches, case of COVID-19, here, sometimes several thousand kilometers away, we must “treat and not send means, as the Samu does”, continues the doctor Emergencyist, who has thirty years of regulation to his credit.
The captain, the main interlocutor
At the end of July, intense navigation period, the emergency doctor Alexandre Saccavini ensures the reception of calls, like the other doctors of the unit, all week from 8 am to 6 pm. On weekends, it is the Center for the reception and regulation of calls for the SAMU 31, in a large room next to it, which takes over.
Monday, Doctor Roux, permanently, treated about thirty. This afternoon is the great calm. Only the Moby -Dick, a sailboat sailing off Croatia, and the Pont -Aven, passenger ship between Spain and England, composed the 196 – the number of emergencies at sea – or the number ten Center figures. “It is the regional operational surveillance and rescue centers that receive calls and necessarily transmit them,” explains Doctor Saccavini.
There are five in France and four in the overseas departments. On the phone, it is the commander of the ship (trawlers, sailboats, merchant marine, ferries) who must be the interlocutor. Situations can sometimes fall under the headache. “We can dialogue with a French commander sailing on a Danish building in the waters of the Adriatic,” said Doctor Roux. Or, like the previous week, with a French tourist on a Norwegian boat traveling to the North Pole. He had to be evacuated. Because if the first mission of the CCMM is to draw up a diagnosis, then to treat and prescribe live, other situations can be heavier to manage.
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