At Delafontaine Hospital, morale is low. One of the largest public health establishments in the Seine-Saint-Denis department was already experiencing a overcrowding coupled with a lack of resources, particularly human resources. But to these daily worries were added those caused by the organization of the Olympic Games with access problems further complicating the daily lives of the staff.
Their summer torment began with the closure on July 15 of the A1 motorway slip road, which serves the hospital. A hard blow for the agents who had been promised by management that there would be no ” no change “ during the Games period in a memo a few months earlier.
The partial closure of this exit, which could only be used by people accredited for the Olympic Games, forced staff to make detours that extended the journey by “twenty to thirty minutes” their usual route, according to Stéphane Degl’Innocenti, SUD union delegate.
“We are only two midwives for 26 beds”
A very problematic situation which had pushed Fabien Gay, communist senator of Seine-Saint-Denis and director of Humanityto write a letter to the prefect of the department, requesting a “hospital staff pass”for whom this sudden change “complicates their professional situation and their working conditions”.
The complaints of the senator and the agents were quickly heard by the prefecture. A few days later, the management explained in a memo on July 30 that it had reached an agreement to set up a badge system to use this famous highway slip road. The problem is that the measure only concerns “the healthcare staff” of the hospital. Other agents, in particular administrative staff with the possibility of teleworking, but also technicians, are not concerned.
As Abdelhak Zombo, general secretary of the CGT Delafontaine, recalls, “We have 600 people working here every day. This travel permit is only valid for caregivers, which is only 250 people.”… A choice which denotes a double standard for “those who do not heal but are still indispensable”underlines Edith Rain, midwife at the establishment.
Her colleague, assigned to the high-risk pregnancy department, Nour Merabet, is also concerned about access for patients with a possible “increase in home and ambulance births due to crowds on the road”. She also reports increased cases of pregnancy monitoring cancellations by women who “feared they would not be able to access the hospital”.
It must be said that this situation adds to the lack of access to care in Seine-Saint-Denis. For the CGT member Abdelhak Zombo, “The Covid crisis had already exposed the fragility that we know in this essential sector. And these Olympic Games sow an additional dose of contempt for the understaffed staff who work hard”. Thus, in the service of high-risk pregnancies, according to Nour Merabet, “We are only two midwives for 26 beds”.
A lack of staff that has led to reducing the reception capacity at times, going from 28 to 26 places, while the hospital is one of the most requested in the department. The establishment also follows a policy of protecting patients in very precarious situations who remain there until the conditions for their discharge are ensured.
In this territory where, according to the Samusocial association, 12% of homeless people in 2023 were women, the structure is committed to not sending mothers back onto the streets without follow-up. However, in the fall of 2023, the reduction in available hotel rooms, again in view of the Olympic Games, and places in accommodation centers, had pushed the midwives to ask the government for additional places for these women and their children in order to free up beds in the overheated establishment. This problem and the latest difficulties in terms of accessibility have contributed to making the level of fed-upness of the staff… Olympic.
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