“Caregivers leave hospital because they do not want to become monsters”

The National Refoundation Council (CNR), one of the major subjects of reflection is health, opens in a context of a deep hospital crisis. We are witnessing a hemorrhage of staff, emergency services had to be reduced or closed … The pandemic has worsened an already very deteriorated situation.

In any health debate, what is first of all a question of clarifying are the reasons for this crisis. Those who leave the public hospital or wish to do so in short term do not want to change jobs for the most part. If they rather redirect to the liberal, the private sector, even education, it is because the hospital crisis is above all moral. It comes from an ethical suffering linked to what healing means.

The care cannot be made to make up and yet it tends to do it. You can’t treat people just by changing their bolts. Of course, France is proud of the high level of technicality of its doctors and surgeons and we would not want to see them flee abroad or the private sectors. But excelling in peak areas is not enough. Patients are dealing with medical secretaries, stretcher bearers, nursing assistants, cleaning agents, nurses, radiology manipulators … Each job has its own skills, who do not merge, but all these people treat.

discreet work

Its mission is to humanize the hospital. Reception, attention, anticipation of needs (to rest, to be reassured …), these essential dimensions of care do not cover those of scientific medicine or of what is evaluated in terms of quantified acts. This is the invaluable part of care, in the sense that it is not measured with management tools, but remains what matters most in the experience of the disease or hospitalization.

This often discreet, even invisible work has experienced unprecedented conceptual development thanks to searches on care, an English word which designates the non -healing dimensions of care and takes on prospect the vulnerability and interdependence of everyone . But, above all, this field of studies is interested in those who deal with others, thus overcoming social devaluation which affects feminized activities, of low visibility, in direct relationship with body taboos and death; Activities that many still believe that they would not ask for any particular skills and would depend above all on a more or less warm temperament.