The entrance to the emergency room always looks like a beehive: patients come in and out, arrive on foot, by ambulance, by taxi… Adel paces in front of the emergency room entrance of the Pasteur hospital in Nice: “I’m going crazy! I’ve been trying to get my mother hospitalized since this morning, they don’t accept her anywhere, there’s no room“, he exclaims. Yet Adel’s mother has clogged arteries and a rotting foot. “I don’t even have the words anymore, I risk becoming rude! _I am very angry_. To have surgery you have to wait a week to 10 days, it’s not possible, that, we are in France anyway!“
Marie-France, sitting in front of the hospital also has a bad memory of emergencies: “_I spent the day waiting_. No one took care of me. They couldn’t find me a room, they didn’t know where to put me.”
Summer promises to be very tense
Too many patients and not enough caregivers: Morgane, nurse at Pasteur confirms: “We are open in the summer, the workforce is reduced by half with the departures on vacation. So _we end up with more patients for less staff_which means longer days, a heavier workload, you have to really like the hospital to stay there.“
The FO union is alarmed by the situation: according to them, 14 doctors are missing to the emergency room to operate normally. Nadine Grand, a nurse at the Pasteur hospital, is a Force Ouvrière union representative. She expects a very difficult summer: “Today the situation is dramatic, especially in the emergency room. We are waiting for the flow of the summer period. This Monday we have already had 326 passages, it starts strong. _We work thanks to the caregivers who work overtime and thanks to the interim but people are exhausted_. And it will increase with the departures on vacation, well deserved. It is out of the question that these jump! We will not go back on the holidays, it is not admissible.”
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