StoryPoor working conditions and pay have mobilized midwives since the start of 2021. Hospital and liberal professionals are on strike again this weekend.
On this rather banal day of 2013, Mélanie Gobillard, then a midwife in a hospital in Bouches-du-Rhône, frantically goes from one room to another. Here, she welcomes a woman shaken by the pain of contractions, there, she leaves a newborn baby on the belly of her mother just delivered from childbirth. This welcomes her third child, who arrived like a charm, in a simple and fast way. The health professional, overwhelmed, does not inquire about the young mother’s condition until almost an hour later and finds her lifeless in a hospital bed pushed into a corner of the birth room. “She had a postpartum hemorrhage that we caught in time, but that I could have avoided if I had had the time to watch her”, says the midwife today.
It is one of these scenes, passed very close to the irreparable, which made Mélanie Gobillard aware that she could not exercise her profession properly in the hospital. However, this professional, now 42 years old, has known almost everything: public maternities and private clinics, level 1 to 3 – level 3 establishments welcoming the most at-risk pregnancies – at Paris, Corsica, Marseille and even Nouméa, New Caledonia. In January 2018, she launched her activity as a liberal midwife and today receives in a modest space, on the ground floor of a building at 15e district of Paris. The soothing sea green of the walls contrasts with the white and anonymous coldness of hospitals.
Since early 2021, midwives have been mobilizing to denounce working conditions that have become unbearable in French structures. The intensity of the days, while they can be “Four professionals [plus de 97 % de la profession étant féminine] to manage up to ten delivery rooms ”, the lack of time that prevents them from taking care of patients properly, too modest remuneration and poor recognition from the hierarchy are all grievances that have led them to take to the streets of Paris six times this year. After a weekend of national strike from 22 to 25 October – and while the Ministry of Health has notably reached an overall revaluation of their remuneration of 500 euros net per month and the establishment of a sixth year of study, proposals however deemed “Notoriously insufficient” by professional unions -, midwives are mobilizing again from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 November.
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