Tension is at its height in hospitals throughout France. In Finistère or in Ille-et-Vilaine, saturated services must close at night for lack of workforce. And the restrictions are multiplying.
by manon boquen
It was enough for a weekend to upset everything. For several weeks, the emergencies of the Saint-Brieuc hospital center (Côtes-d’Armor) have seen their narrow waiting room overflow. On December 9 and 10, attendance reached 245 patients in one day. The staff sounded the alarm. “We knew we would be in the red,” sighs Doctor Christian Brice, emergency doctor. In order to recover beds quickly, the Breton representative of the Association of Emergency Doctors of France (AMUF) asked his management to deprogram short operations of ambulatory surgery. These do not require accommodation and are largely carried out by liberal practitioners within hospitals. The disillusioned forty deplores: “out of 39 operations, only two were postponed … Result: we had during this time 25 patient patients on stretchers in the corridors, without any privacy.”
A situation far from being unique in France. And Brittany is no exception. Since the beginning of December, alarmist announcements have been linked. In Lorient (Morbihan) and Quimperlé (Finistère), the Brittany Sud hospital group asked the population to go to the emergency room “with extreme parsimony”, when the hospital in Paimpol (Côtes-d’Armor) warned on the saturation of the service and advised to favor other choices – treating doctor, medical house – before coming. On the side of Landerneau (Finistère), the closure was decided every night from December 23 to January 2, “due to the absence of an emergency doctor,” said management by press release. Scenario identical to Redon (Ille-et-Vilaine), since mid-October, for the same reasons of tightened workforce. The Breton Regional Health Agency did not wish to comment on all these difficulties.
lack of everything
Lack of beds, lack of arms, lack of everything. This is the portrait brushed by professionals from the emergency department of Saint-Brieuc, who prohibited visits to families and restricts its access to those who call 15 upstream of their arrival. “We are in a malicious system and, by force, we become malicious without wanting to, we too,” regrets a young doctor from the break room. In the corridors, the stretchers are piled up, regardless of pathologies. The waiting time to get a hospital bed at the moment? More than twenty-four hours, under the neon lights and in the permanent hubbub. Not to mention the tension that now reigns between liberal practitioners and their public counterparts. According to Maxence Forestier, caregiver and CFDT representative, “the hospital applies a fiscal policy and, to remain attractive, it promotes the liberal activity which brings him more, while we should play collective in this kind of moment” .
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