Emergency services under strain: risk of strike ?

Nearly fifty hospitals are under pressure this summer& ;eacute; due to lack of staff. If the resigning Minister of Health believes that the situation is less tense than last year, in some emergency services, discontent is starting to rise.

Saturated emergency rooms. As every summer, the same scenes are repeated tirelessly in emergency services in France. Long waiting times, regulatory measures, or even outright closure for some, emergency rooms are overwhelmed. In an interview given to Ouest-France, the resigning Minister of Health, Frédéric Valletoux, stated that “around fifty hospitals” are currently under pressure. The reason ? The lack of staff and the excessive influx of patients. Without specifying the exact number of establishments forced to close partially or completely, the minister nevertheless wanted to qualify his remarks by explaining that the situation “is a little better than last summer” and “not as strong as during the 2022 one”.

Explaining that there are still several “delicate situations to regulate”, the remarks of Frédéric Valletoux thus go against those made last week by Marc Noizet, the president of the Samu urgences de France union. The latter in fact affirmed that the current situation facing emergency services is “at least equal to, or even worse than, that of 2023”.

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Towards a risk of strike?

If certain services are saturated at the national level, locally certain establishments are on the verge of asphyxiation. This is the case, for example, at the Digne-les-Bains hospital center where; staff started working an unlimited strike this Tuesday, August 20. The cause is a lack of doctors on sick leave for many months or others on leave. maternity. "This is something that could have been anticipated' and we find ourselves à do a sort of sorting è “emergency entrance,” explained &agrav; BFMTV Anne-Laure Reynaud, CGT delegate & hospital.

The situation at the Digne-les-Bains hospital is not an isolated case. It adds to the problems already known in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence where several establishments are subject to occasional closures, such as in Manosque and Sisteron. According to the unions, the problems that are not exclusively confined to a local level require a response at the national level. “We really need to deploy a real health policy” “public with a deployment of doctors throughout France where they are needed,” explains Anne-Laure Reynaud. The need to have more trained doctors, as well as a revaluation of the public hospital are also measures to set up by the government, the union representative further explains.

Solutions considered

For his part, Hugues Breton, union representative of the Association of Emergency Physicians of France for the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, proposes that trained foreign doctors be able to join the services in full practice once their activity has been validated by the service. Finally, re-establishing bridges between general medicine and emergency medicine would be another avenue to explore to put an end to the lack of personnel encountered in many hospital establishments.