Martin Hirsch, boss of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), announced Friday that he was leaving his post, in a letter addressed to the staff of which Agence France-Presse was aware. Against the backdrop of the unprecedented crisis in the public hospital, the senior civil servant, who has headed this behemoth of the health system since 2013, which employs more than 100,000 people and operates 38 hospitals, will leave his post as director general at the end of of the month.
In his letter, Martin Hirsch salutes the courage and selflessness of AP-HP staff in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, but regrets not having been able to implement “a hospital model different from what it was before, closer to all of our expectations and ambitions”, a commitment he had kept at the dawn of the pandemic. “It was because I thought that I could not meet all the conditions for this commitment to be respected that I decided, a month ago, to hand over my position as Director General of the AP-HP to the disposal of the government,” he wrote.
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“I am convinced that many of the ills from which we suffer call for changes of the same magnitude as those which were made in 1958, when the university hospital was redesigned to restore its strength, nobility and attractiveness”, he added. while the health system, and the public hospital in particular, is one of the two major projects of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term.
Aged 58, Martin Hirsch is an atypical personality in the world of French elites, long stamped on the left, but a member of Nicolas Sarkozy’s government. Normalien, enarque, holder of a degree in neurobiology, State Councilor, he was president of Emmaüs France (2002-2007) before entering the government of François Fillon as high commissioner for active solidarity against poverty.
It is at the origin of the active solidarity income (RSA), which succeeded the minimum integration income (RMI). In 2010, he took over as head of the Civic Service Agency before being appointed, at the start of François Hollande’s five-year term, director general of the AP-HP, at the helm of which he would face the wave of Covid-19 in from spring 2020.
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