Monday, January 9, a majority of caregivers in the service emergencies at Pontoise hospital (Val-d’Oise) went on sick leave to denounce the deterioration of her working conditions. A first in Île-de-France, according to the Regional Health Agency (ARS). In Nantes, since Tuesday, 60% of the paramedic emergency nursing staff at the Confluent private hospital have been on leave.
In Moselle, the prefecture and the ARS launched the white plan last Friday throughout the department. Since mid-December, numerous work stoppages have greatly disrupted Thionville emergency room. Three other hospitals had started in early January (Sarreguemines, Forbach and Saint-Avold).
Christophe Prudhomme, spokesperson for the Association of Emergency Physicians of France (Amuf-CGT), predicts a national extension. “It’s a new epidemic, an epidemic of sick leaves for emergency workers, and the contaminations are going at a worrying pace” , declared at the start of the week Marc Noizet, successor to the Minister of Health François Braun at the head of the Samu-Emergencies union in France.
After launching in 2018 the « No bed challenge », which lists patients who have spent the night on a stretcher (113 in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday), the union has undertaken since December to display the “unexpected deaths” in the emergency room (thirty-seven according to his count, at least 150 according to estimates).
“Here is the factory”
The blues caregivers is not new but is getting worse. “At the end of the 1990s, the phrase that came up in the surveys was: Here is the factory , observes sociologist Ivan Sainsaulieu (University of Lille), author of the book The discomfort of caregivers, released… in 2004. What is amazing is the permanence of the problem, which comes not from a concern for profitability of care but from a productivism of care, which has increased the workload. »
If emergencies crystallize the blues caregivers, “there is a structural problem in the hospital which is not limited to emergencies, and the developments announced by Emmanuel Macron in his wishes bring little novelty to a hospital organization which will remain very hierarchical, say the caregivers. »
The conjunction of the three flu, Covid and bronchiolitis epidemics put a lot of pressure on hospital staff worn out by three years of health crisis. If the epidemiological indicators improve this week, the morale of caregivers does not follow the same curve.
