May 5, 2022 |
Social
The government has just launched an occupational health plan in the public service. The result of long years of consultation, it is also the result of a report: “Health, safety, quality of life at work in the public service: a duty, an emergency, an opportunity”. Meeting with Pascale Coton, vice-president of the CFTC and co-rapporteur of the report, to discuss it.
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So we have on one side an absence of occupational medicine, but what do we have on the other?
Personal initiatives by the teams and their management… Anti-suicide centers have, for example, been created in certain police stations, with the agreement of psychologists. These initiatives were of great interest to us. These could sometimes be small initiatives, but always effective.
For example, at the CHU hospital in Rouen, time management between daily tasks and the organization of work was a problem. The team from one of the departments therefore decided to set aside a quarter of an hour every morning to discuss the objectives and what could be improved. If one service was working well, another service needed to be advised, etc.
From the “internal grub”?
Yes, we can say it like that. Another example is the town hall of Poissy, which had been struggling with stagnant absenteeism for a few years. When the mayor, Karl Olive, took office, the city set up an initiative intended to reinforce the well-being of the agents of the community, in particular by the sport. The idea was as follows: agents who practice a sporting activity are agents who will be better in body and mind.
Several improvements have emerged from this initiative, such as a reduction in short-term outages. The town hall even saved 100,000 euros, the equivalent of three full-time jobs. This has also fostered a relationship of trust between the officials of the town hall and the inhabitants of Poissy. We can speak of a real virtuous circle.
Personal initiatives are commendable, but shouldn’t a larger-scale application be needed? Is that why the government decided to apply your recommendations and launch this occupational health plan?
In reality, this comes from a desire to apply good practices in terms of health at work, from the private sector to the public service, or even to pool the two. We had noticed that in companies with as many employees from the private sector as from the public sector, the post office, for example, certain tools and services [inspection du médecin sur le lieu de travail, cabine de télémédecine, infirmerie, etc., Ndlr] available to employees in the private sector were not available to those in the public sector. It was simply necessary to generalize all these good practices.
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Through this report, we really tried to put words on the evils, to detect the good practices and to list them, to say to the government “look, it exists, it is not expensive. We have to multiply it”.
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It should be remembered, however, that this plan was a request from the State. Which is a good thing, because occupational health had to become a political subject.
Le 1is Last May marked Labor Day. On this occasion, we were able to hear that France would be the European leader in accidents fatalities at work. Are you okay with that? Is France deadly for its workers?
I am not surprised by this statement. The reason: the lack of prevention. The CFTC has been campaigning for more prevention in occupational health for several years. The Covid-19 crisis has, for example, revealed that the weakness of prevention policies has widened health inequalities. Our system does not succeed in effectively countering health inequalities because it has not implemented a real long-term prevention policy.
This is why the CFTC wishes to thoroughly rethink all the funding models of our health system to make prevention a cross-cutting priority at the territorial level. With more resources allocated, we could train more and better. We could also increase the number of occupational physicians.
We are lucky in France to have a civil service. It is therefore a duty and an emergency to protect its officials.
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