- To overcome the shortage of protective overcoats, the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) would equip its staff with trash bags.
- This is confirmed by a very viral photo and video from two hospital staff.
- Plastic bags supposed to serve as protective overcoats are well used in several AP-HP establishments, as 20 Minutes has been able to verify . They were produced in an emergency by a company normally specialized in the manufacture of trash bags.
After the crumbly overcoats like paper (but defective) in Marseille, trash bags as a protective overcoat in some public hospitals in Ile-de-France? On Facebook, the photo of an AP-HP staff member, wearing a plastic “suit” resembling a transparent trash bag, was shared more than 12,000 times in just two days.
"I have the honor to present to you our new official" overcoats "received at Pitié Salpêtrière ... a plastic" bolero "bag with open and unprotected sleeves on which we put a blue garbage bag in which we make holes -Even to enter the head and arms… And we no longer even mention [the masks] FFP2 expired ”, says the author of this post denouncing the consequences of the lack of usual protective clothing within the establishment.
A few days earlier, an even more viral video filmed in an unnamed hospital already showed "new protective clothing" to open "like a trash bag" and requiring to make holes in the arms and neck so you can put it on.
New protective clothing at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital 😱 pathetic and dismal # COVID19 # Covid_19 #Coronavirus #Confinement pic.twitter.com/JpFhBfzmg2
- General 💎 (@LE__GENERAL) April 16, 2020Contacted by 20 Minutes ,the two authors of the viral publications did not respond to our requests, any more than the AP-HP (Public Assistance-Hospitals of Paris). However, several members of the nursing staff working in two different establishments of the AP-HP confirm to us that such outfits are well distributed to the teams.
FAKE OFF
"These are our new outfits put in place until replenishment of overcoats, says a member of the nursing staff of Pitié Salpêtrière, who adds:" Hospitals are also trying to wash disposable overcoats but this is for the moment a failure. There are no more materials in the hospital and if we have a second wave of patients, I don't know how we will treat the patients. All the departments also have FFP2 masks dating from the 2000s, and we don't see any replenishment of new masks. ”
A member of the hospital staff at Henri Mondor hospital also abounds:“ I saw these protections within the department. resuscitation. It has been there for at least a week and we are also asked to wash the disposable overcoats to reuse them. ”
"These are not trash bags but they are seen as such"
Asdine Aissiou, secretary general of CGT Hôpital Pitié Salpêtrière, also confirms the use of these atypical protective clothing within the Parisian establishment, while specifying: "These are not garbage bags, these outfits are seen and experienced as such by staff - including within the CGT - but these are plastic bags resembling poor quality trash bags, they are much more fragile, it looks like what some marathon runners put on before the race . "
" There was no presentation within the CHST, we were shown these plastic bags within the departments, explaining to us that it was the usual protection because we lack blouses, it was badly lived and it reinforces the feeling of not being considered. It is a low-end protection system, an inadmissible and not normal means of protection that generates poor working conditions, ”he adds.
Overcoats made in an emergency by a trash bag company
In this case, if these criticized plastic bags are not, strictly speaking, trash bags, they are manufactured by the company Jet'Sac, normally specialized in this field, as explained by the JT of France 2 of 13 h this Tuesday in a report (from the 31st minute of the replay). The company in question supplies “thirty hospitals in France”, including “the AP-HP”: “Machines that run at full speed, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. On the lines, medical gowns in plastic. For this company, which normally produces trash bags, the objective: to urgently produce nearly 3 million overcoats per week to answer the call for help from caregivers. "
"It was indeed a cry of distress from the entire hospital sector, all the hospitals who called us directly saying:" listen, we have no more blouses, we are not spending Easter weekend, find us a solution ". In one weekend, we went from manufacturing garbage bags to manufacturing overcoats ”explained Frédéric Deplancke, general manager of Jet'Sac - contacted, the company had not responded to our requests before the publication of the article.
The report also noted that two new versions of the plastic protection have already been designed thanks to the feedback from the nursing staff, while an employee openly recognized the difficulty of creating an adapted device: "The first [model] was not necessarily easy to put on like a t-shirt, the new versions are much better and we are still trying to find solutions so that […] it is closer and closer to a blouse, even if at the beginning it was not our job. "
At the beginning of April, authentic trash bags had however been used in the civil hospices of Lyon, as reported by our colleagues from France 3 Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. And the use of this D system was also observed in a New York hospital in late March.
Contacted by 20 Minutes, Grégory, operating theater nurse with state diploma and member of the national office of the Inter-Blocs collective, warned of the more general consequences linked to the lack of suitable outfits or masks: “There are a lot of healthcare workers contaminated due to the lack of adequate personal protective equipment and those we receive - often from China - are not of good quality ”.
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