Caroline Baudry, edited by Solène Leroux
While the Scientific Council fears a “disorganization” in France from January due to the Omicron variant, the Lille University Hospital is already facing a lack of personnel. According to the site manager, fatigue and saturation are the main reasons.
The Omicron variant already seems to be disrupting France. The duration of the isolation, when one is positive or in case of contact with Covid-19, can currently go up to 17 days. With the rise of the epidemic, this risks posing major organizational problems at the start of the school year.
At the Lille University Hospital, the nursing staff are already affected by organizational problems. Every day, there is a lack of 600 caregivers on site, ie “a hundred absentees per day additional compared to the same period last year”, explains Frédéric Boiron, the general manager of the hospital.
A 1% increase in one year
Absenteeism which “represents approximately 10 to 11% of our workforce, and which has increased by approximately 1% compared to last year at the same time,” he assures us. How to explain these figures? For the director, “it is also linked a lot to fatigue, to saturation” since “the staff has been extremely mobilized for two years” because of the health crisis.
Without forgetting that the nursing staff “has the same constraints as the others in his life”, he explains, by mentioning the diseases, or even the “problems of care of children and relatives”. “It’s a very simple human reality in an extremely busy professional population.”
The importance of vaccination
According to Frédéric Boiron, what can help caregivers at the moment, “is that the population understands that it is necessary to be vaccinated widely, and to use care as much as possible wisely to share the collective responsibility”.