Hospital workers demonstrated Thursday, November 14 by thousands throughout France to demand more resources and manpower, an "alarm" to which Emmanuel Macron promised to respond with "strong decisions" next week.

"We must (...) assume to invest more strongly than we had planned to do," said the head of state, having "heard the anger and indignation" of the caregivers, when a trip to Épernay (Marne).

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A plan "consequent" and "strong decisions" will be announced Wednesday by the Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, which will detail "the amount, the scale, the technical modalities and the calendar", specified the president of the Republic at the moment thousands of doctors, nursing assistants, nurses, deans and students paraded in France.

"Caregiver exhausted, patient in danger"

Increase of wages, increase of the workforce, reopening of the abolished beds ... The claims did not change, visible Thursday on placards like "Save our hospital, give us the means", "Caregiver exhausted, patient in danger", "I do not make money I heal people" ...

There were 10,000 in Paris according to the organizers (7,500 according to the police), who also counted 3,000 people in Toulouse (700 according to the prefecture), 400 in Brest as in Quimper and several hundred in Nantes. AFP journalists also counted a few hundred protesters in Lyon, 300 in Bordeaux, 220 in Lille, a hundred in Marseille and 150 in Besançon.

This call for a "big demonstration", launched by the new collective Inter-Hospitals, had been full of support. Starting with the collective Inter-Emergency, the origin of an unprecedented social movement, started in March in Paris and spread throughout the country, with another 268 institutions affected earlier this week.

The interns too

An unprecedented mobilization extended in the evening by a general meeting at the Paris hospital of Pitié-Salpêtrière, to "decide on the continuation of the movement".

Three weeks before the inter-professional strike of December 5 against the pension reform, some wished a coagulation of the struggles. But the subject divides the caregivers, who failed to agree on a new date of mobilization, others evoking a "unitary event" on November 30.

In parallel, interns are consulted for ten days by their Inter (Isni) on a possible "total and unlimited strike from Tuesday, December 10".

"Support plan"

Agnès Buzyn promised at the end of October a "support plan" to focus on "better current investment" and "the revaluation of wages, especially early in the career." But the Minister of Health has already failed twice to come out of this conflict: neither the monthly bonus of 100 euros paid since July, nor the plan of "refoundation" announced in September were enough to ease tensions.

The recovery of the file by Emmanuel Macron has not changed the situation. The number one CGT, Philippe Martinez, said "convinced that the government will not afford," because "when it is Bercy who decides, in general the stock market is very small.

In recent days, the Ministry of the Economy had said that a recovery, even partial, of the huge debt of public hospitals (30 billion euros) was "not an option considered." And if Bruno Le Maire recognized that it was necessary to "respond" to the "suffering" of the staff, he warned that "if we spend money on the hospital," we should "find ( er) savings in the face ".

With AFP