The Covid-19 crisis was not unrelated to his departure, but his decision was taken long before. Amandine, who wishes to remain anonymous, left the Montauban hospital center in January, after sixteen years in the emergency room. For nine months, the emergency physician has joined the ranks of temporary workers, these doctors who perform replacements and fill in the gaps in hospitals.
“It’s special to go to the other side of the mirror, when I had always said “never” “, confides this 46-year-old woman. Like many voices in the medical world, she too had previously viewed them with a critical eye, some as “Mercenaries” going to the highest bidders.
But the doctor, who now navigates between guards in the emergency room in two small health establishments in her region, feels a million miles from this portrait. “Me, either I exploded in flight, or I left”, she said, summarizing quite simply the symptoms associated with “Burn-out”, of the “Lump in the stomach” of ” sleeping troubles “, Passing by “Irritability” …
With the interim, she was able to put an end to schedules that she could no longer stand, with these night and weekend guards, with ever greater painfulness as they advanced in age, not to mention the meetings of organization in addition, the projects to be set up. Now she works a third of the time less. She performs about three 24-hour shifts per month, as well as six to eight replacement days, to earn 5,000 euros net, against 6,500 euros previously.
“Do care, and good care”
The health crisis has been revealing, as many caregivers have expressed it at the end of the first wave of Covid-19, denouncing the return to “the abnormal”: “We saw during the Covid that everything could be simpler in the emergency room”, summarizes Amandine. Finished the puzzle to find places of hospitalization, the aggressiveness of the patients, or even the flow of entries so important … “It played on the meaning of our work, it confirmed to me that I wanted to do care, and good care”, she continues.
What does she think of the cap on the remuneration of temporary workers, a promise made by the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, in July 2020? She sees it rather as a ” good thing “, but that will not convince her to return to the hospital. “I will do everything, but I will not come back to it, I know that cannot change”, she said, preparing for a retraining, in the coming months she hopes, in liberal medicine.
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