Brigitte Bourguignon is used, during official ceremonies, to wear an enamel necklace that the staff of the Frontenaud retirement home (Saône-et-Loire) gave her in the fall. A pendant that she sees as the symbol of her twenty-two months in government, during which she showed “his social paw”.
Simple minister delegate in charge of autonomy, Mr.me Bourguignon becomes, at the age of 63, full-time minister of health and prevention. She succeeds Olivier Véran to carry the file presented as a priority – with education – of Emmanuel Macron’s new five-year term.
He will have to dive into the bath immediately. It is in a difficult context that the former socialist arrives: that of the hospital and emergency crisis. The closures of emergency services are increasing at night and on weekends – around one hundred and twenty services, or almost one in six in the territory, are in great difficulty on May 20, according to a census by the SAMU-Urgences de France union. . Summer is already shaping up to be high risk, we are being warned from all sides in the hospital community.
“Real Reforms”
MP for Pas-de-Calais since 2012, first under the socialist banner before being re-elected in 2017 in the Macronist majority, she will be a candidate again in June. She left the presidency of the Assembly’s social affairs committee to enter the government in July 2020, just before the rebound of the health crisis in the fall. She quickly showed that she knew how to take advantage of adversity to bring her cases to fruition. Even if it means clashing as during her first council of ministers, where, a bit untimely, she dares to warn about the fate of home helpers, “forgotten from the Covid bonus”.
“His greatest victoryremembers a relative, will have been to bring the home help sector out of the shadows to the point of managing to put the head and mouth of Emmanuel Macron this subject in his campaign. It was not won! » Even if she did not carry an old age law – promise not kept by Emmanuel Macron -, she was able to congratulate herself on having carried out “real reforms” : the revaluation of the wages of home helpers in the associative and public sector, the construction site of the modernization of public nursing homes, the establishment of an allowance for employees “near caregivers”.
In January, the Orpea scandal led it to react urgently to the excesses of the private commercial group brought to light by Victor Castanet (The Gravediggers, Fayard, 400 pages, 22.90 euros). His responsiveness in trying to contain the fire was appreciated at the Elysée. His good relations with Elisabeth Borne, who has invested in the promotion of old age professions, will not be too much to try to win his future arbitrations.
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