The plan announced by Emmanuel Macron in September 2021 at the end of Psychiatry Assizes, with the key to the creation of 800 positions, is considered insufficient by the profession.
Mo12345lemonde with AFP
“Craiant lack” of hospitalization beds, “regular closures” of medico-psychological centers for lack of sufficient workforce: hospital psychiatrists are invited to mobilize, Tuesday, November 29, against the “dilapidation” of a sector public victim of a “abandonment” of the State, according to their unions.
Four organizations call on strike and demonstrations, especially at 11 a.m. in Paris, before the Ministry of Health. Gatherings are announced in other cities, in front of regional health agencies (ARS) or hospitals.
These unions denounce an “abandonment of public psychiatry” which “is characterized on a daily basis by the glaring lack of complete hospitalization beds and regular closures of medico-psychological centers (CMP)”. A situation linked to the shortage of staff and nurses, who “today affects five out of six hospitals”, according to an intersyndical press release.
“We no longer have the ability to treat as we want,” deplores Doctor Norbert Skurnik, president of the inter -union for the defense of public psychiatry (IDEPP). According to this psychiatrist, for lack of reception, “in Ile-de-France alone, 60,000 to 70,000 people, at least 60 % of whom are mental patients, wander outside of any institution and all domicile”.
The specialty no longer attracts young doctors
In a context of “hardening” of working conditions, the specialty no longer attracts young doctors, deplores Doctor Skurnik, citing the figure of one hundred interns to be distributed in the Paris region, “where it would take 150” . To promote recruitments, this union official defends an increase of “20 % to 25 %” of the salaries of hospital psychiatrists, in the form of arduousness premiums.
Fourteen months after his presentation, the plan announced by Emmanuel Macron at the end of psychiatry foundations, with the creation of 800 positions in the CMPs, is considered insufficient by the profession. “It’s just a small step,” said Doctor Rachel Bocher, president of the National Intersyndicat of Hospital Exercise practitioners (inph)
This psychiatrist is also campaigning in favor of “a plan for the attractiveness of careers”. Organizer of a conference “Cities and mental health” – from Thursday to Saturday in Nantes -, she hopes to welcome the Minister of Health, François Braun. “There is a need for public authorities to resume social dialogue with psychiatrists,” she said.