Nine hospitals and one clinic in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes describe saturated services, especially in emergencies, and can no longer absorb the influx of patients. This contingency plan leads them to “partially” postpone scheduled surgical and medical activities.
Triple epidemic, saturated emergency services, shortage of personnel, beds: the haemorrhage of the French health system is getting worse this winter. And it forces the factories to trigger their contingency plans. On Thursday, December 29, nine hospitals and one clinic in Savoie and Ain activated a «territorial white plan», at least until January 3rd. It allows them to immediately mobilize all their resources to face the crisis. Objective : “absorbing the influx of patients in the emergency room” et “free up beds in the services” they specify.
“In the last ten days, hospitals in the Savoie-Belley area have been facing severe tension, which has particularly affected the emergency services”, specified these ten establishments in a joint press release. They will therefore, concretely, “partially descheduling their scheduled surgery and medicine activities”. In other words, vital operations will be privileged to the detriment of others, deemed less urgent. The establishments want to be reassuring and specify that these postponements will be “without immediate loss of possibilities” for affected patients. But who says that deprogramming can mean delays in treatment, deterioration of patient health and anxiety of waiting.
They join the Pays-de-la-Loire establishments, where the plan had already been activated by their Regional Health Agency (ARS) in mid-December. Because the crisis affects the whole territory. An unprecedented triple Covid epidemic has been overwhelming French hospitals for several weeks, already on their knees after two years of a pandemic. The flu is particularly serious and now exceeds the peaks of recent years. Covid and bronchiolitis have started to decline but remain at a high level: More than 7,000 new Covid-positive patients were hospitalized between December 19 and 25, detailed Thursday Public health France. To deal with it and provide other care, the number of beds is insufficient; the staff, exhausted and sometimes resigned, are no longer able to absorb the influx of patients.
As a result, the emergency services are completely saturated: the “difficulties in admitting patients are getting worse” describe the establishments of Savoy and Ain. Wait times fly by, “sometimes more than ten hours”. And with the wait increases the risk that patients die on stretchers, without the health workers having had time to deal with it. At least 23 have died under these circumstances since December 1, according to the Comte de Samu-Urgences de France.
Traveling on Wednesday to the Annecy Genevois hospital (Haute-Savoie), Health Minister François Braun had foreseen a «risk week», due to the triple epidemic, the usual festivities between Christmas and New Year and the strike movement of liberal practitioners. The former emergency room doctor had nonetheless wanted to reassure and praise his troops, ensuring their mobilization “absolutely complete” manages to “hold” the system.
Insufficient speech for Marc Noizet, president of the Samu-Urgences de France union, questioned by Publication Thursday : “We are told that the hospital is holding up, that it will pass, but no, it won’t. We must act immediately.”
