The decision was expected. On June 22, the Council of State ruled: public hospitals must set up “a reliable, objective and accessible system” to count the hours worked by interns and hospital practitioners.
Three unions of doctors and interns, the Intersyndicale Nationale des Interns (ISNI), Action Praticiens Hôpital and Jeunes Médecins, had seized the Council of State to force the government to strengthen the regulations in force concerning the limitation of working time to forty – eight hours per week. In their sights: the calculation system provided for by the Public Health Code (in half-days).
A request rejected by the Council of State, which considers that the law, as it stands, already implies “necessarily” that public health establishments equip themselves with“a reliable, objective and accessible system allowing to count (…) the daily number of hours worked by each agent, in order to ensure that the duration of his effective working time does not exceed the regulatory ceiling of forty-eight hours per week”.
A rejection which has, however, the value of ” victoire “ for the ISNI. “We consider this decision to be one of the most important for the health sector in the past fifteen years”, reacts its president, Gaetan Casanova. It could, in his view, force institutions to completely “rethink” their organization, while “40% of hospital staff are interns”.
Anxiety and exhaustion
For the Council of State, it is therefore not the regulations that need to be reviewed, but their application. Because the texts already limit working time to forty-eight hours per week, divided into half-days, and calculated on the average of three months for interns and four for hospital practitioners. But in fact, these work much more.
According to a 2020 survey, interns work fifty-eight hours a week on average. And 10% of them even exceed seventy-nine hours. A problem about which students and union representatives have been warning for years.
Three-quarters of medical students suffer from anxiety, and nearly 67% experience burnout, according to findings froman October 2021 survey. Already in 2014, the European Commission ordered France to comply with the legislation set by the European Union and by a 2015 decree relating to the working time of interns. The former Minister of Health Olivier Véran had promised, on the occasion of Ségur, “financial penalties” with regard to establishments that do not comply with the regulations. A promise renewed in 2021, after a series of student suicides at the start of the year. “Every eighteen days, a medical intern commits suicide”, then alerted the ISNI.
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