Caregivers are vigilantly awaiting measures from the Ségur de la santé. This government plan, which must be unveiled on Monday, provides for more resources given to the hospital and especially the long-awaited upgrading of careers. Among the most precarious professions, caregivers like Jennifer, who works at the Parisian hospital of La Pitié-Salpêtrière. Like her, everyone sacrifices a lot of their life for their job, for a remuneration deemed too low.
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Longer days without taking breaks
"We are able to not pee for seven hours because we do not have the time. The hospital has become a factory, we have to make numbers all the time" denounces Jennifer, evoking the hellish rates that punctuate her days.
In ten years, she has seen the conditions of her job as a nursing assistant deteriorate, and the coronavirus crisis has not helped anything: extended working days, waking up at four in the morning, every other weekend at work, missed family celebrations ... So many sacrifices that the caregiver does not consider sufficiently taken into account, especially in terms of his remuneration: 1,600 euros net per month.
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"There is no longer any pride in saying: I work in public assistance"
A clearly insufficient amount for Jennifer: "It hurts, I give of myself every day. I love my job but we have bills to pay, children to raise and almost every month we are exposed from 300 to 400 euros ". A situation that discourages young caregivers. And Jennifer understands this, because according to her, "today, there is no longer any pride in saying: I work in public assistance".
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"We can't do it anymore"
A disillusionment which leads his colleagues to the private sector "after six months", even "a year". "Inevitably, when you say that you are going to work such a rhythm of work and that you will be paid so much, even with all the will of the world, that does not send you dream."
A situation which makes all the more expectations vis-à-vis the "Ségur de la santé" and government announcements. "There is an emergency, we have been able to find the strength to take on us, to fight in the face of the situation. What we must not do is to become the hospital before," says Jennifer. And the reason is simple, if caregivers remain on the warpath in the face of the crisis, "today [they] can no longer do it".