“The situation is complicated” in hospitals, acknowledged the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, on Wednesday.
The minister was invited by Liberation to react to the worrying figures of the Scientific Council, which noted in its opinion of 5 October “a significant percentage of closed beds, estimated at around 20% [malgré] already significant and increasing use of overtime and temporary work ”.
There would therefore be 20% of beds closed in France due to the lack of staff. “The figure of 20%, I would tend, like that, to dispute it, added the Minister to the National Assembly. And in any case, because I love science deeply and before speaking, I make sure that I am not telling anything. I asked to have as exhaustive a study as possible on the state of closure. “
5,700 more beds closed than at the end of 2019
At the end of September, a Drees study indicated that at the end of December 2020, hospitals recorded 5,700 more closed full hospital beds than at the end of December 2019.
However, the figure is exaggerated, according to Olivier Véran: “For the moment, the only figure I have is on a very fragmented sample of 16 CHUs. With all the biases that we can recognize, on 16 CHU, the last data that came back to me is 5% of medicine beds temporarily closed. We would therefore be quite far from 20% of the general hospital stock ”.
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“We are paying for decisions made twenty years ago”
Olivier Véran defended his record with Liberation, and in particular the investment in favor of salaries during the Health Segur, rejecting the current problems on the policies carried out during the previous five-year terms.
“There are decisions that weren’t made twenty years ago, we are paying for them today. We don’t rewrite history in a snap, but we can turn it around now. […]. We are in a policy of increasing our staff, whether it is doctors with the end of the numerus clausus and more than 17,000 students who are now in second year of medicine, or nurses and nursing assistants with the creation of 6,000 additional places in schools for the start of the 2021 school year. We had to make these decisions, and we took them. However, all of this takes time. “
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Five professions in tension
The Minister also announced an “increase of nearly a third of vacant positions among paramedics compared to the fall of 2019”. “We have just carried out a probe in sixteen CHUs and indeed, if we extrapolate the data, we see an increase of nearly a third of vacant positions in paramedics compared to the fall of 2019.”.
In the sector, five professions are in tension, assures the minister: nurses, operating room nurses, nurse anesthetists, radiology technicians and physiotherapists.
“A number of units in hospitals are forced to close temporarily, or downsize, for lack of caregivers, especially for lack of being able to recruit,” he adds.
Nursing students who drop out
Olivier Véran also notes an increase in absenteeism “of a little less than one point over the same period for non-medical personnel”, as well as resignations, but “in moderate proportions”.
In addition, between 2018 and 2021, a little more than a thousand nursing students in training “resigned before the end of their studies” and “an investigation will be launched” so that we “understand the reasons”.
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