2023-12-30 05:00:04
During the installation of a mobile health unit in the emergency parking lot of the New Civil Hospital in Strasbourg, December 22, 2023. JEAN-MARC LOOS / PHOTOPQR / L’ALSACE / MAXPPP
An exceptional situation, an exceptional response? In any case, this is the adjective that the healthcare unions use to describe the installation, outside the New Civil Hospital of Strasbourg, three days before Christmas, of a “mobile health unit” allowing up to eight people to be accommodated and transporters (ambulances and fire engines) to be released more quickly. An initiative, the first of its kind, intended to reduce waiting times which have lengthened over the weeks in front of emergencies.
“It has happened that ambulances have found themselves stuck, with patients on board, for two, four, six or even eight hours in the hospital parking lot,” reports Christian Prud’homme, nurse anesthetist and secretary of the Force Ouvrière union at Strasbourg university hospitals, which has increased alert rights and taken legal action. He even happened “that all carriers be immobilized at the same time”.
The prefab, whose deployment is scheduled until January 2, 2024, allows patients to be received and monitored by firefighters, but does not provide medical care; in other words, not the intervention of doctors. “It’s a bit like a temporary reception area, time to reduce the pressure at the emergency entrance and reopen beds in the rest of the hospital”explains Céline Dugast, general director of Strasbourg university hospitals, while a blank plan was triggered, in mid-December, by the Grand Est regional health agency in all Alsatian establishments, faced with the influx of patients and saturation of services.
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Such a plan, which makes it possible to deprogram non-urgent operations or reorganize staff schedules, has recently been lifted at the regional level, but “this does not prevent certain establishments from maintaining it, at their level, depending on the degree of tension”it was specified, Friday December 29 evening, at the Ministry of Health.
“It’s spreading everywhere, quietly”
And alerts are ringing elsewhere. During this end-of-year holiday season, which traditionally puts the health system under strain – because there is a shortage of resources, because beds are closing, while the number of patients is not decreasing – the situation, of union source, is also alarming in the Var, where a growing number of services are forced to close at night (one in two, it is estimated in the ranks of SAMU-Ergences de France, two out of a total of nine, according to the Ministry of Health).
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