2023-07-16 11:55:00
Due to a lack of personnel and equipment, many emergency services in France will have to close for the summer, especially at night.
The president of the Association of Emergency Physicians of France, Patrick Pelloux, denounces this Sunday on franceinfo “a deterioration that we have never seen in the provision of care at the emergency level”while several services partially or completely close this weekend.
franceinfo: Emergencies closed at night or on weekends in Carpentras, Vitré, Argentan… Will this become the norm?
Patrick Pelloux: It is somewhat the will of the Minister of Health [François Braun]. We might add Carhaix, Pontivy, Lannion, Guingamp… It’s all of France. We already experienced that last year. Obviously, they put the dust under the rug when we realized that there was an excess mortality of 50,000 people last year. It’s a first. Now, the emergency services, which are still the guarantee of public service, is: “manage yourselves!”. When you have an emergency service that closes, the emergency services will take people to another emergency service. So it’s the game of dominoes. There is a structure that has fallen, the others will fall because suddenly, there is absolutely massive congestion in the emergency services that remain.
Are there any reasons to worry regarding his health?
But yes ! Now, it’s closing everywhere, whether it’s the city or the countryside. You tell yourself that there is a hospital, that you are safe. There you create insecurity and discontent. When you have patients followed in one hospital and who have to go to another, we must not forget that we are at zero degree of IT and collaboration between services, so we do not have the file, we’re going to redo the exams, so we’re going to keep the patient. There is a deterioration that we have never seen in the provision of emergency care. The state is contradictory with the law of 2013 which said that all French people must be 30 minutes maximum from an emergency structure. They have trampled the law. Some structures are open every other day. Doctors are leaving because the statutes are no longer attractive, they earn a lot more in the private sector or via teleconsultation systems. Staff are exhausted because working conditions have worsened. Emergencies are the adjustment variable for all system malfunctions. When the Minister of Health says: “phone the Samu and the famous control airlocks”, people are then told to go to the emergency room because there is no other solution.
Hospital directors believe that their services are disrupted by the salary caps for temporary doctors: does that complicate things?
It was nonsense, we had put in an ultra-liberal competitive system, which meant that you had hospital doctors who worked at night for 250 euros, and one who arrived through an interim box and said “I’m getting 4000 euros”. Today, it disorganizes the services because behind, it was necessary to make more attractive the trades, in particular those which make night guards. It’s not just the emergency doctors, there are also the surgeons. There has been a desire for years to break the attractiveness of hospital practitioners and doctors. This year, the National Center for Management, which manages the careers of hospital doctors, warned that they have never had so few candidates for public service positions. It’s awful. for people, to whom we say: “instead of taking you to the emergency department which is next to your home, you will travel 60 kilometers”. It’s absolutely abject violence for elderly people, families who don’t have a car. The control airlock at the Samu is a decoy. Ultra regulation has its limits. The minister replies: “I know but we have no other solutions”. I don’t agree at all on the evolution he is taking in the hospital service. We are a public service at the service of the population. And that, I think they have all the same forgotten a little bit.
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