Brigitte Bourguignon, François Braun, Aurélien Rousseau, Agnès Firmin Le Bodo and, since the last reshuffle, on January 11, Catherine Vautrin… One minister of health chases the other, in a position which has rarely seemed as unstable as under this second five-year term of Emmanuel Macron. And the healthcare system is sinking into crisis. In any case, this is the feeling of a large segment of caregivers: hospital services are saturated, private doctors’ offices are always full. “The system is cracking”, we repeat on the ground. But with the feeling of no longer being heard.
The health crisis marked a rupture and focused attention on the situation of hospitals and caregivers. This was still the case a year ago, with the surge of “triple epidemic” mixing flu, Covid-19 and bronchiolitis in hospital services, shortages of medicines observed almost everywhere, a strike movement by private doctors…
And after ? “Nothing changes, but no one dares to say anything anymore, says Marc Noizet, head of the SAMU-Urgences de France union. Slowly, we arrive at complete resignation. It is terribly dangerous, for caregivers and patients alike. » “We are in a constant race to keep our heads above watertestifies Luc Duquesnel, boss of general practitioners of the Confederation of French Medical Unions. For many colleagues, the question is no longer when things will improve, but how long they will be able to hold out…”
“Load shedding” at the Lille maternity ward
From Lille to Strasbourg, from Créteil to Mayenne, the symptoms of a “disease” which is eroding the healthcare system continue to appear, always the same – missing workers, services which close or operate in a degraded manner, expanding medical deserts, patients who cannot find an appointment… Without the political response seeming capable of reversing the trend.
At the Jeanne-de-Flandre maternity hospital, at the Lille University Hospital – one of the largest in France –, the decision caused a lot of noise: faced with the lack of pediatric neonatologists, transfers of patients have been organized, since December 2023, to other hospitals in the region, and as far as Belgium. ” Maternity continues to function normally, only certain care related to neonatal resuscitation is referred to other partner establishments”we specify to the management of the CHU, while emphasizing that transfers of this type are not unprecedented. The fact remains that this organized “load shedding” should last until May, time to replenish the medical workforce.
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