open beds, yes, but not without staff

The figures delivered by the Regional Health Agency (ARS) this Thursday, February 11 confirm the critical position of the Moselle in the number of Covid cases: 290 new people infected per 100,000 inhabitants. Growth which, for the time being, has no catastrophic impact on the number of hospital beds. Even if the three Metz-Thionville CHR, Groupe Uneos and Claude Bernard establishments in Metz are able to rearm very quickly, within the limits of available staff, these figures alarm the various departments.

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Quantified situation

If the hospitals have already started the deprogramming of non-vital operations for a few months, they still accumulate the scheduled acts and the reception of patients with Covid. “We have sixteen resuscitation beds which take care of Covid patients and twelve in continuing care units,” explains Régis Moreau, CEO of the Uneos Group. We have two free beds left. It’s very simple, to open a Covid bed, I close two others. So I closed 181 beds to open 90 dedicated to Covid. Services such as psychiatry, aesthetics, or orthopedics, have closed their doors ”.

As for the Claude-Bernard clinic, “the situation mirrors the territory,” admits Gabriel Giacometti, very tense. Eight intensive care beds are dedicated to the care of the Covid ”. Claude-Bernard’s general manager assures us that he will be able to assign four more. “During the first wave, we went up to sixteen beds, but the shortage of personnel does not allow us to open as many. “

the CHR currently has 170 patients with Covid, including thirty-six in critical care. “The situation is tense, explained this Thursday François Braun, head of the emergency department of the CHR and president of Samu-Urgences de France (SUdF), but we have far fewer patients than last spring”.

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Staff shortage

Lack of staff. The force of the war. The situation was already serious before the health crisis, the latter only reinforced the departures of caregivers, at the end of the roll. “The flight of personnel has worsened, insists Gabriel Giacometti. “We no longer have enough staff,” adds Régis Moreau. Marie-Odile Saillard, general manager of the CHR Metz-Thionville, like the others, has long been alerting to the catastrophic situation of a lack of staff, at all levels of the system: caregivers, nursing aides, nurses, doctors …

Managing an epidemic is one thing, you still have to have the human resources. This is where the problem lies.

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