Paris (AFP)

In a few days, they will be in intensive care to practice gestures that they have often never done: doctors and medical students are training at high speed in nursing, to strengthen the hospitals of the AP-HP and fight against coronavirus.

"I have never done that, but it will be learned on the job, when we are in the hospital, we will see well on the ground", says Eliott, 22, external student in 4th year of medicine at Paris Descartes University, a bottle in one hand, a syringe in the other. He learns injection and dosage of drugs.

Faced with the "tsunami" of serious patients with Covid-19 in Ile-de-France, hospitals in the region managed by the AP-HP risk saturation and need reinforcements in nursing staff. And first, nurses.

In 24 hours, Eliott will be able to be called in reinforcement in intensive care services to practice nursing care, which they must assimilate in a few hours during express training courses given on the Picpus campus of Paris managed by the AP-HP.

Even if he had to "somehow improvise", he could not continue to "do nothing", he explains. "Our vocation is to go and help".

Blood test, venous injection and injection of medication ... Around him, the other volunteers, including a cardiologist, also discovered care. No one masters these technical gestures, usually practiced by qualified nurses.

"Today, what we need most at the AP-HP is the paramedical and the nursing side," said Martin Hirsch, the director general of the AP-HP, who counted on Monday. "more than 1,700 patients with Covid-19 in critical care".

- "The more nurses we have, the more beds we will have" -

For Hadrien Scheibert, who heads the platform managing volunteer caregivers at the AP-HP, "the more nurses we have, the more beds we will have in nursing homes because these services need this type of caregiver". An intensive care unit requires the mobilization of a nurse for two or three patients.

On Monday, nearly 200 nurses were sent to hospitals in the Paris region via this platform.

During the training, the caregivers learn above all the hygienic gestures such as putting on gloves and disinfecting equipment, essential in the nursing profession, especially in the Covid sector.

In a room, Antoine *, 35, a radiologist in a Parisian hospital, is trying to apply a venous route to perfuse a patient: "It must have been ten years since I did this", says the doctor, "But it comes back quickly," he says in front of a mannequin lying on a stretcher on which he exercises.

"Until today, I could not have done anything, but there I feel better, already more ready than this morning," he adds.

Establishment of a tourniquet, asepsis of the skin, finding a protruding vein: each step of the taking is decrypted by another nurse. In a few minutes, she must in particular train four medical students, novices in the field.

"Nursing is not to be taken lightly, especially in intensive care, it is essential to train these caregivers even if they are doctors at the base," says the trainer, who wishes to remain anonymous.

Since Friday, several dozen volunteers, doctors and external, are trained every day for this nursing care, insists Martin Hirsch. "They will be sent mainly to sheave, but also to geriatrics for example," said the director general of the AP-HP.

On Monday, France surpassed the mark of 3,000 deaths recorded in hospitals, with an unprecedented influx in intensive care, especially in the Paris region.

* name changed

© 2020 AFP