On Tuesday, health workers assembled in cities throughout France to require greater pay and more staff for already overpopulated systems, two days before the country votes in parliamentary elections.
Regardless of the fact that newly re-elected President Emmanuel Macron has launched an investigation into which emergency units require immediate assistance, many in the industry caution that there is no time to waste.
‘Not a single department is spared, our public hospitals are in the process of dying lacking resources,” said Pierre Wach, head of the CGT, a prominent trade union, in the eastern city of Strasbourg’.
Protests started in hospitals Tuesday morning and continued in the afternoon at the Ministry of Health in Paris, where personnel, some wearing white medical jackets, carried banners with inscriptions such as ‘Hire more and pay us more, it’s urgent!’.
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However, the number of participants was smaller than expected, with between 200 and 300 in the capital and similar figures in locations such as Grenoble, Nantes, Toulouse, and Bordeaux.
‘It’s been a total mess for years, and we’re fed up with it. Our working conditions are atrocious and patients are suffering because of it’, said Ronan Treguer, a child psychiatric nurse in Nantes.’
‘I love my profession, but it’s hard to stay motivated because we can’t do it properly anymore,’ said Nathalie Niort, a nurse demonstrating outside the hospital in Clermont-Ferrand’.
Following years of Covid-19 tension, the casualty workers’ association Samu-Urgences de France discovered in a May poll that at least 120 accident and emergency hospitals nationally had already cut back on labor or were about to do so.
On Friday, Macron told regional newspapers that his evaluation, which will be done by the group’s CEO Francois Braun, would identify;
‘where there is need, emergency department by emergency department, ambulance service by ambulance service, region by region’.
However, opposition politicians and labor organisations have accused him of stalling until after the legislative elections on June 12 and 19 — when some surveys show the president’s absolute majority is under threat.
‘It’s pastime for inquiries,’ Laurent Berger, Leader of the influential CFDT trade union confederation, wrote in the left-wing daily Liberation, urging for ‘urgent talks on how staff are organised’ as hospitals were ‘almost knocked out’.
Braun stated last week that he would not write “yet another report,” but would instead “write the prescription” for hospitals in need.
Better remuneration for night and weekend labour, as well as — more controversially — a system for evaluating 911 calls to identify the most critical, are among the improvements he has already proposed to newly installed Health Minister Brigitte Bourguignon.
‘We have to switch to crisis management mode to get through the summer,’ Thomas Mesnier, an MP loyal to Macron who is also an emergency doctor, wrote in the JDD weekly.
A summer heatwave, which has killed old people in previous years, or a new flare-up of COVID-19, according to some emergency professionals, might plunge hospitals into disarray.
