"Ladies and gentlemen our fellow citizens, will you let the public hospital die without having tried something?" In a forum on Sunday, 13 emergency doctors call on citizens and public authorities four days before the national demonstration for a "plan of emergency for the public hospital".
"We come to ask ourselves the following question: has not the exhaustion of the system been programmed, has not everything been done to collapse the public hospital in favor of the economy is not the goal to destroy the social security and the hospital public service? "question these doctors, including the emergency physician Patrick Pelloux, all members of the Association of Emergency Physicians of France (Amuf) , in a long tribune published in Le Journal du Dimanche .
From "overconsumption of care" to "hospital business"
Retraying the drifts of the 80s and 90s in the "overconsumption of care", then the arrival in the 2000s of "the company hospital", with the emblematic system of the fee-for-service, the authors of this text summarize the current situation: "our public service mission is to do everything all the time, but the government does not give us the means". Monday, November 4 at 8 pm, 35 patients are hospitalized in the corridors of an emergency department of a hospital in Paris.This means that the hospital could not absorb the 35 patients who required hospitalization during the long week-end, "they describe. They calculate: "he missed thirty-five beds of hospitalization is a staff of two nurses, two doctors and two caregivers".
But, they add, the positions of caregivers "are no longer filled because working conditions too difficult frighten the most altruistic with very low wages (France is the twenty-sixth place in the OECD for the salaries of nurses ). " "There is a lack of medicines, stretchers, beds but also humans to occupy the services, to care for the patients". Believing that "the dismantling is being completed", they ensure that "by exhausting the caregivers, they were made to flee: infernal social spiral". "Not only is the public hospital deficit, but it will become ineffective since it is unable to fulfill its mission of continuity of care for all".
They recall in conclusion the demands of the mobilization of 14 November: "the opening of beds", the increase of the budget of the hospital, staff and wages, as well as "the stop of the billing to the act ".