A hard blow for a profession already damaged by the Covid-19 pandemic. The order of nurses is questioned by the Court of Auditors in a summary made public Tuesday March 30. In its decision, addressed to the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, the institution chaired by Pierre Moscovici points to the “Great difficulties in the functioning of the order”, such as failure to register, erratic handling of complaints or insufficiently controlled ethics.
On the verge of bankruptcy in 2011, due to a “Poor collection of contributions” and a “Level of expenditure too high”, the order, created in 2006, has initiated a recovery plan validated by the courts, thus making it possible to pay off debts and regain leeway.
Only 52% of nurses registered with the order
The crisis has nevertheless left traces, preventing the order from carrying out its public service missions, notes the Court. Among these is the registration of nurses on the order board. Mandatory, however, in December 2020 it only concerned 52% of the profession, or 378,000 nurses out of a total of 722,000. “This average rate masks significant disparities between the liberal (registered up to 96%) and hospital workers (registered up to only 31%)”, specify the magistrates. And to see “That officials, in particular hospitals, persist in not transmitting the lists of their nurses to order or transmitting unusable data”. The Court recommends recalling “Firmly” their obligations to employing establishments.
Because of this lack of registration, “Faults and shortcomings committed by a nurse are nowhere traced, escape peer review and deprive patients of the ordinal remedies enshrined in the public health code”, deplores the Court, which considers that “The management of complaints remains largely perfectible and compliance with the rules of ethics is insufficiently controlled”. So, “The order has invested little in its mission of controlling agreements concluded between nurses and the pharmaceutical industry”.
More broadly, the Court of Auditors had ruled in its recent annual report that the orders of the health professions did not sufficiently monitor compliance with the ethics of practitioners and had to clarify the disciplinary proceedings of the accused.