Excellent news for the 300,000 inhabitants of Cornouaille, in Finistère. The Quimper and Concarneau hospital center announced on Wednesday, September 11, the launch of a real estate investment project worth 62 million euros, including 18.9 million financed by the Regional Health Agency. Investments that have been expected for years. Since 2021 to be exact and the Ségur de la santé. The Ségur de la santé is this major consultation conducted in 2020, during the Covid pandemic, to improve the healthcare system in France. Several aspects came out of it: a revaluation of healthcare professions, and a financial envelope for investment projects in the sometimes aging healthcare system.
Relieving pressure on emergency rooms
In Quimper and Concarneau, this modernization project was presented this Wednesday by the hospital management, the mayor of Quimper, Isabelle Assih, also chair of the hospital’s supervisory board, the prefect of Finistère and the Regional Health Agency, which gave the green light to this major real estate project for the territory. In Concarneau, day hospitalization activities will be developed, hospitalization services will be renovated, with the establishment of post-emergency medicine, and a scanner will complement the MRI for medical imaging.
In Quimper, the hospital will be almost completely transformed. First, the emergency department, regularly saturated, with stretchers in the corridors, because there are not enough beds to accommodate patients once they have been examined… And that is the whole objective of the short-stay hospitalization unit that will be created right next to the emergency department. A unit that should help relieve congestion in the department and reduce waiting times. In total, the emergency department will almost double in size, with an additional 6,000 m².
Explosion of consultations
Then, this project provides for investments to better care for cancer patients, including the acquisition of a fourth particle accelerator for radiotherapy, costing several million euros, a bunker that could attract new practitioners and should make it possible to treat more patients.
Specialists who could also strengthen outpatient activities, where patients are increasingly numerous. Given the lack of specialists in community medicine, demand is exploding at the hospital. Between 2022 and 2023, for example, there were 5,000 additional consultations across all specialties. We must therefore make more space to accommodate more patients and attract practitioners. Because ultimately, with these investments, the objective is to make CHIC (the Cornouaille intercommunal hospital center) an attractive establishment for caregivers and patients.
But we will have to be patient. In Quimper, work should begin in January 2027 for commissioning in 2029. A year earlier for Concarneau.
