Increase of the “Covid bonus” to 1500 euros for all, tenure of jobs, protective equipment for all CHU agents… Hospital staff, unions and support will meet at the roundabouts of the Pellegrin and Haut-Lévêque emergencies this Tuesday and Thursday. They will defend the improvement of working conditions, at the heart of the discussions of the “Ségur de la santé” which has just started.
After Sud Santé Social, which launched an unlimited strike on Friday, the intersyndicale (FO, CGT, National Nursing Coordination) of the Bordeaux University Hospital joined the call to stop work on Tuesday, and to mobilize on the roundabout de Pellegrin, then this Thursday in Haut-Lévêque).
Unions propose “A static movement, to respect sanitary measures, between 12h and 15h “, which will not affect patients or the functioning of hospitals, in order to alert the situation of caregivers.
Hospital staff are demanding in particular the increase from 500 to 1,500 euros in the “Covid bonus” to all of the CHU Bordeaux staff. If the Gironde is not one of the 40 departments most affected by the epidemic, the CHU welcomed patients with coronavirus and its director “may raise” this premium to 1500 euros “for the services or agents involved in the care of patients contaminated (…) or mobilized by the exceptional circumstances of exercise ”.
Premium or depression
On the occasion of the technical establishment committee on Monday, May 25, the management of the Bordeaux University Hospital said that this bonus would finally be paid in June or July, without announcing for the moment who could benefit from it. According to the communication department of the CHU, it is however certain that part of the hospital staff will not be entitled to it: “Distributing it to the 14,200 CHU staff would represent an unrealizable expense”.
The intersyndicale, for its part, calls for “equity” between all professions.
“A paramedic, an ASH, the stretcher bearers or the administrators were also exposed to the risks of the Covid and came to work. If the envelope is insufficient, we don’t want arbitration “, explained to France 3 Nouvelle-Aquitaine Pascal Gaubert, of FO.
“All the hospital staff felt the psychological pressure of this epidemic, I was afraid of dying, of infecting my family,” explains Nicolas (the first names have been changed), centralized biology receptionist.
“Useless” masks
“When I understood that we would not have masks during the epidemic, I was shocked, I no longer slept at night,” said Camille, a laboratory technician.
As in the general population of France, the question of masks crystallizes the scolding of caregivers on the management of the crisis. For several weeks after the start of the epidemic, laboratory workers, 130 laundry workers, stretcher bearers, medical secretaries, and others did not have masks, which management deemed “unnecessary” for them. non-caregivers.
“We had to handle samples from infected people, without a mask,” says Nicolas.
Franck, trade unionist at Sud Santé Social and logistics worker at the Pellegrin University Hospital, denounces working conditions which did not always allow for physical distance. At the Pellegrin centralized biology reception, more than twenty agents work in premises of 20 m2.
“The infected patients were scattered throughout the hospital, we were in the same building and we met the same people all day long, without masks,” pointed out the unionist.
Jackpot
After claiming protection several times, the services of Franck, Camille and Nicolas, among others, finally received their first masks on April 17. Equipment approved by the CHU itself.
“It was a patch-up, it fell all day, it was not up to standard,” explains Nicolas.
After new complaints from the agents, the departments concerned received two masks, approved by the ARS every day, but “all of them expired,” says Franck.
According to Julie, a Saint-André emergency nurse, the masks were also rationed – two per 8-hour day -, with instructions varying from day to day.
For its part, the management of the Bordeaux University Hospital says that “the management of supplies and stocks every week allows not to be in shortage”. If the hospital center claims to have lacked nothing, it nevertheless made the decision in March to open a Leetchi kitty to purchase 70 respirators through donations.
“On the brink”
Pressure from the epidemic has been intense for all hospitals that have received Covid-19 cases. But the strike movement announced on Tuesday not only demands recognition of this period: it follows numerous mobilizations within the hospital to demand better working conditions.
“I would like us to seize this period of crisis to realize that the public hospital is on the brink and act before it is too late,” points out Julie, the nurse from Saint-André. “The problems we encountered during the crisis already existed before, they have only been exacerbated. ”
According to her, emergencies are thus always minimal in staff. During the crisis, sick staff were not replaced, says Julie.
“Of the 38 people in my department, 26 declared burnout during the year to preventive medicine” denounces Nicolas. “We are timed for our 30 minute lunch break, we cannot go to the bathroom as much as we want, cigarette breaks are repressed … and above all our jobs are precarious”.
In fact in this service, only 8 people are established. However, the centralized biology receptionist stresses that without a fixed-term contract, renting an apartment or taking out a loan is almost impossible in Bordeaux. Enough to divert from the health professions many aspirants put off by working conditions. These are at the heart of the discussions that started this Monday in Paris with the government, as part of the “Health Segur”, and on which the mobilization of caregivers intends to weigh.
–
