“Hospital under pressure” plan launched at Nîmes University Hospital: “On Sunday, it was almost Beirut in the emergency room!”

L’activité a été beaucoup intense aux urgences du CHU de Nîmes depuis ce dimanche d’où l’activation du plan “hôpital en tension”. Midi Libre – Archive N. B.

This Monday, January 6, the Nîmes hospital center moved to level 3 of the Hospital under Pressure plan in response to cases of acute respiratory infection. The CGT of the CHU has noted an increase in emergency room attendance since Sunday.

Unsurprisingly, like what is happening in Bouches-du-Rhône and Hérault, the management of the Nîmes University Hospital triggered its “Hospital under Pressure” plan this Monday, January 6 after observing a very high number of people in the emergency department in recent days. A consequence of the increase in cases of flu, Covid, bronchiolitis and a high circulation of respiratory viruses. “Sunday was almost Beirut!”, according to the CGT union at the Carémeau University Hospital.

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According to hospital workers, the number of patients, usually 150-170 per day, has risen to 320-330 people taken into care. For three days, there were not enough beds to accommodate them: “What worries us is that the peak of the flu epidemic, particularly virulent this year because it immediately affects the lungs, has not yet been reached”, says Magali, a CGT representative.

If, during the end-of-year holidays, this increase in power was managed as best as possible, it has been much more complicated in recent days between a rise in cases of acute respiratory infection and the resumption of operations scheduled for the return from school holidays.

Lack of “downstream” beds

For the CGT, what has not improved patient care is the health policy implemented for years with bed closures, the lack of so-called “downstream” beds for patients who must be hospitalized after leaving the emergency room. “We prefer outpatient beds that bring in more money. […] But the public service is also all those who were called in as reinforcements and came on Sunday because there were only three doctors in the emergency room to deal with the wave of patient arrivals”, reports Magali.

According to the CGT, the previous political choices, but also the night regulation of reception at the emergency rooms of Alès and Bagnols-sur-Cèze, “the fact that the private sector is not playing the game by not taking its share while the public service needs help”, according to the CGT, puts the Carémeau emergency services in even more difficulty.

Reinforcements in human resources with the plan

Faced with this increasingly tense context, the management of the CHU could only activate this Hospital under Pressure plan “which allowed a rapid adaptation of the reception capacity thanks to the mobilization of all the professionals in the emergency department, the 15 center, the access to care service as well as all the medical and surgical services of the establishment”. The CGT specifies that this plan allows, for example, to have a second bed in the rooms, to ensure that patients are discharged more quickly, to modify the organization to better manage this epidemic.

The management of the CHU also mentions the reinforcements in human resources for the medical and paramedical teams necessary in the face of the saturation of hospitalization possibilities downstream of the emergencies.

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