Having a blood test or a laboratory test may become more complicated in the afternoons starting Monday. The unions of biologists call for the strike and the closing of laboratories every afternoon until October 1st. They denounce a decrease of 170 million euros in funding from the Health Insurance. New savings that could lead to the permanent closure of "small" local laboratories.
Increased risk of medical desertification
The hunt for biologists is unprecedented. Because to reduce the aid of the health insurance for the laboratories of analysis revolts those who take care of the patients in the countryside and which are difficult to be profitable, estimates the syndicalist Jean-Claude Azoulay: With the savings that we are demand and which are now becoming unbearable, the measures that will be taken, it is to suppress these sites of proximity which make it possible to fight against the desertification which one attends at the moment. Why? Because each site is expensive, because of its existence , staff, automatons who are on site and biologists. "
Risk of aggravating congestion in emergencies
In total, 500 small laboratories would be threatened in the Territory, with consequences: the closures would force patients to travel several tens of kilometers or again to go to the emergency, fears Lionel Barrand, biologist doctor and president of the union of young biologists medical. He is afraid to see his neighborhood laboratory in Alsace disappear.
With these announced funding cuts, "we will no longer be able to maintain this biology of proximity, with patients on one side to explain their results, and I will no longer be close to the prescribing doctors to talk with them. of their patients. What makes each person, who has a medical question, with a biological assessment to do, will be able to do it only in the hospital. We risk saturating even more the emergency services, which for the moment are not able to do this, and therefore increase the time required to render results, which may be urgent, because simply ... we do not manage. more."
Therefore, ten days of strike are planned to put the pressure and after "we will see", launch the unions. New negotiations are announced next week.