A new hospital is forced to reduce its activities due to lack of staff. Since last Wednesday, the emergency department and the maternity ward of Chinon, in Indre-et-Loire, have been closed. A direct consequence of caregiver burnout. In recent years, they have been assigned more and more tasks, without additional recruitment. The management advises to go to the city medicine or the Samu. Both staff and patients are therefore immersed in uncertainty and worry. Report from Europe 1.
“The days are exhausting”
A small, shabby place in the town centre, on the first floor of a regular café, where there is only one subject of conversation: “Earlier, a lady told me and I told him ‘yes, I am aware'”, confides François on Europe 1.
Because François is a nurse in the hospital, on sick leave, like 21 of his colleagues, harassed by paces that they can no longer keep up. “The days are exhausting (…) to tell yourself that you don’t have time to change the protections of a 90-year-old lady, it’s psychologically complicated to accept,” he explains.
A predictable closure but which worries pregnant women
The closure was thus predictable, say the caregivers. But, the rest remains uncertain, underlines Tiphaine. For a week, the midwife has been sending dozens of patients to hospitals in Tours and Saumur to give birth.
Cécile, her belly rounded and her gaze furious, does not hide her anguish. “We are not going to call Tours since we were not followed there, nor in Saumur”, she laments on Europe 1. It remains to be seen whether these two hospitals will be able to accommodate all the new patients, says a Force Ouvrière trade unionist. He says he fears a domino effect and the exhaustion of new caregivers.