For 2 years, the State has paid 30 billion euros in exceptional aid for hospitals. However, are the quality of care and reception in emergency services better? To find out, the JT of TF1 spent a day at the Valenciennes hospital in the north.
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Is France living beyond its means?
For two years, the Valenciennes public hospital has benefited from an additional 60 million euros. The objective: to improve patient care. In the emergency room, for example, a new patient arrives every three minutes. To manage the flow, caregivers were hired and the team reorganized. A position of regulatory doctor has also been created. Its role is to identify the most urgent cases so that they can be taken care of as quickly as possible in order to reduce waiting times. However, patients continue to wait, sometimes several hours. For what ?
The absence of a doctor in town is costly for the hospital
“Everyone comes to the hospital because it is the only possible recourse which is immediate. We have the impression of only dealing with bobology and rarely with vital pathologies and patients who wait on their stretcher without say nothing, whereas sometimes you have patients who we know don’t have anything serious. attests Nicolas Roothaer, emergency doctor at the Valenciennes Hospital Center, in the report above.
The reason: not enough doctors in town. Result in the emergency room, 1 in 2 patients has nothing to do about it. This is the case of a patient who comes for a toothache. “You need to see a dentist.”says the doctor on duty. “There are no dentists available. They don’t want to take on new patients or anything, so we have to make do as best we can,” the patient replies. He knows that finding a dentist will be difficult. The absence of a doctor in town is costly for the hospital, because patients arrive too late when their pathology requires more expensive care.
Let us now take the case of a young girl who comes for a dental abscess. “A CT scan costs several hundred euros. A hospitalization is the same, or perhaps several thousand euros if there is a surgical procedure. Potentially, it can cost several thousand euros, therefore much more expensive than a simple consultation with a dentist”explains Nicolas Roothaer.
We would have a smart card where all the exams would be placed inside at the national level, that would be a huge saving.
We would have a smart card where all the exams would be placed inside at the national level, that would be a huge saving.
Sandrine Van Oost, senior health executive in the emergency department of Valenciennes hospital.
But that’s not all, each person treated in the emergency room systematically undergoes a battery of analyzes without checking whether certain examinations have already been done elsewhere. “Sometimes, there is redundancy, that is to say that you go to do an assessment in town, but we do his blood test again. So that is indeed a cost for society for example. We would have a smart card where all the exams would be placed inside at the national level, that would be a huge saving margin. admits Sandrine Van Oost, senior health manager in the emergency department at Valenciennes hospital.
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Costly redundancies, too few doctors in town… Over the past 2 years, however, an additional 30 billion euros have been released. While the public hospital costs each French person on average 150 euros per month. “We can clearly see that there are almost no visible improvements in the hospital. There is mercenarization where we have gone from 5,000 to 10,000 temporary doctors, with thousands of nurses who are temporary. Every human organization knows that it is extremely expensive”, analyzes Frédéric Bizard, health economist.
The Valenciennes hospital is one of the best managed establishments in France. It’s even one of the few not to lose money. To relieve emergency room congestion, he is building a care center that will be able to accommodate around a hundred patients per day. A 32 million euro project partly financed by the State.
V. F TF1 report: Fabien Chadeau and Gilles Parrot
