Stéphane Burgatt (Correspondent in Marseille) / Photo credits: Nicolas TUCAT / AFP 7:55 a.m., March 22, 2024
Can we still get treatment while living in a neighborhood plagued by drug trafficking? In Marseille, caregivers are finding it increasingly difficult to carry out their job. At the Edouard Toulouse psychiatric hospital, paramedics are obliged to show their credentials during their interventions in certain cities.
Do public services still have a right to exist in the districts of Marseille plagued by drug trafficking? Delivering mail, providing home care... everyday actions that postmen and nurses must carry out in fear, searched by armed thugs at the entrance to the cities.
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“It’s like customs”
This is the most difficult, the most frightening part of the job, nurses from the Edouard Toulouse psychiatric hospital explain to us: when their ambulance stops at the roadblock manned by hooded teenagers. "We're talking about checkpoints. You have to show your credentials, that is to say they search the vehicle. We are made to get out of the car, we can be asked to open the trunk. And you have the lookout who opens his jacket to highlight the fact that he is carrying a gun. It's to show that they are the bosses", confided an ambulance driver to the microphone of Europe 1.
But, after the general search, all is not yet won, according to another nurse. "It's like at customs, it's a border. They will allow us access or not. Sometimes they will even tell us that they are the ones who will pick up the patient, so that we do not get into the block. They think we are police officers in disguise,” she regrets, believing that the caregivers “disturb the traffic, the customers.”
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Caregivers of the “molested and beaten”
A drift observed for around fifteen years now by the Sud Santé general secretary of the Kader Benayed hospital. "There have already been injured people, people who have been molested, beaten. We are in a worrying drift and today, we are being asked to take risks to provide treatment. That is why we are asking for a bonus in difficult territory. We could even call it bonus in a war zone if necessary. But it's getting complicated," he says with alarm.
Faced with the situation, these nurses are more and more often escorted by the police.