His departure, announced on Friday, is accompanied by a regret: not having been able to build "a hospital model different from what it was before, closer to our expectations and our ambitions at all".

In a letter to the staff of the AP-HP, Martin Hirsch claims to have "put all his strength into it" during his nine years at the head of the institution.

This fine communicator, 58 years old and looking like an eternal first in the class, found himself more than ever in the light during more than two years of Covid.

"It's going to rock": one of his formulas from this period sums up the situation of his last years at the head of the AP-HP, immersed in the multiple waves of the pandemic and in a structural crisis.

The character does not leave indifferent.

For many staff representatives, he will remain the man of savings and the reorganization of working time.

Axes partly responsible, according to some, for the "loss of meaning" for staff.

A "real killer", launches the emergency doctor Christophe Prudhomme, of the CGT-Santé.

"He applied more and better all the directives of the government, which aimed to reduce the airfoil".

"He gradually stifled and killed the desire to work at the AP-HP", says a former member of the cabinet of the former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn.

"public health virus"

According to this source, his relations with her "deteriorated very quickly around his reform of the AP-HP in 2018".

The minister has also wanted him to leave several times, without ever obtaining it from the government.

Conversely, for Jacques Maire, fellow student of Martin Hirsch at the ENA and outgoing Macronist deputy, "he is a guy who really has this public health virus with a plural and complete dimension: health, administrative and political" .

"He gave a lot, a lot in this commitment", he underlines, evoking "a reformer but also someone who, as boss of the AP-HP, had to absorb a deterioration of the healthcare system and very high levels of constraint".

During the difficult negotiations on working time at the AP-HP, he had been criticized internally for giving "the impression of using his current functions to accelerate his career".

He describes today a "passionate relationship with the AP-HP".

"I saw my parents being treated and dying at the AP-HP, my children being born at the AP-HP, many friends devoting themselves and complaining while working at the AP-HP, and I had seen , child, my mother fight to build a library for sick children in Garches", he recalls in his letter to the staff.

Enarque and normalien, he studied medicine for five years at the faculty of Cochin-Port Royal, in Paris, where he received his "first pay slips: 150 francs per month", he confided to AFP , to later become director of the central pharmacy of AP-HP hospitals, from 1995 to 1997.

Coming from a line of senior state clerks, he then headed the cabinet of Bernard Kouchner, Secretary of State for Health from 1997 to 1999 during the first seven-year term of Chirac, then the French Food Safety Agency. .

This senior civil servant, ranked on the left, was volunteer president of Emmaus from 2002 to 2007

In his unique career, he was also one of the faces of "openness" under Nicolas Sarkozy, who appointed him High Commissioner for Active Solidarity.

As such, it is at the origin of the active solidarity income (RSA), which succeeded the minimum integration income (RMI), and of civic service.

© 2022 AFP