Ten geriatric beds will be closed this Monday. “We are forcedconfirms Élisabeth Coulomb, deputy director of the intercommunal hospital center of Toulon – La Seyne (CHITS), given the fragility we are facing right now in terms of the number of geriatricians”.
Vacancies, work stoppages… The context is particularly tense at the end of the year. “But we have been looking at ways to offset these closures through early January and to ensure there is no impact on patients”adds the management representative.
Fourteen more beds in January
Laurent Ducros, head of the hospital’s intensive care unit, details: “There will be no clear closure of the beds. We are organizing to open another ten beds. We will see where we have them but we will meet the needs of patient reception”.
Then, from 3 January, “we will continue with ”winter unity””continues the doctor.
Sainte-Musse will thus benefit from fourteen additional beds, financed by the regional health agency, intended to respond to the excess of hospitalizations during the winter. And this “at least until the end of January”.
Dr. Vincent Carret, former head of the emergency room, hospital doctor of Sainte-Musse and head of the Var section of the Association of Emergency Doctors of France (Amuf), has just signed a long and virulent denunciation column “the work of weakening and deconstructing our health system, subject to the dictates of neoliberal globalization”.
“The hospital will be under pressure once again this coming holiday season, to have to take over and carry the healthcare system, and deal with a triple outbreak of Covid-Bronchiolitis-Influenza breathless”, the doctor observes again. Involving successive governments and former health ministers. And it ends: “Every day I ask for forgiveness and apologize to our patients and their families instead of those who should. (…) This hospital crisis is a crisis of the very foundations of our Republic, at the service of everyone’s protection. (…) Only a duty of courage and responsibility in the face of the lessons learned from these crises will make it possible to foresee a return of lost trust in our rulers. A prerequisite is to ask for forgiveness”.
