Ppublished on February 28 and titled “Planning a perinatal policy in France: organizing the continuity of care is a necessity and an emergency”, A medical academy report states that this planning “should be based on a further reduction in the number of maternity cases”.
However, over the past thirty years, few improvements in this area have followed the disaster of medical deserts and the massive closure of two thirds of maternity wards, despite the observation of the poor results of France compared to its European neighbors.
Pretending to believe in communicating vessels, the report asserts that only type 2 and 3 maternities, respectively suitable for medium-risk and high-risk pregnancies, “could accommodate the most complex care pathways as well as the most physiological health pathways by strengthening human resources and at the cost of architectural adaptations allowing the coexistence of different levels of care”.
Contempt
It would suffice to merge 111 type 1 maternity wards, said to be low risk, the most “physiological”, with type 2 and 3 maternities, in order to avoid, notes the report, the caricatural image of“baby factories” which often targets large structures saturated and therefore unwelcoming”.
Suffice to say that it is a question of harming the remedy, by always advocating the same solution that does not work, with the same analysis and the same view of the situation. If we have to talk about figures, in 2021, metropolitan France has 452 maternity wards, including 170 type 1, 222 type 2 and 60 type 3. Removing 111 maternity wards means organizing a desertification of the offer offered to pregnant women .
But let’s be reassured, “the perinatal desert” announced would be compensated, still according to the report of the Academy of Medicine, by “thee development of hotel-hospital structures” where women would be accommodated while waiting to give birth, or even, but this is not said, to be triggered.
What degradation, in defiance of pregnant women and their families! Rather than proposing to reopen more welcoming maternities, to promote birth centers whose development is still hampered, to finally create autonomous physiological units, to organize coordinated care to authorize home birth, in growing demand and practiced in other European countries for a long time, the report proposes as a measure ” Lighthouse ” to abolish type 1 maternity wards. Because, “architectural constraints, but especially those related to medical and paramedical personnel, make it illusory to support an activity of less than 1,000 deliveries”.
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