DBefore the senators on October 25, the budget minister [Gabriel Attal] highlighted the planned 4.1% increase in the hospital budget for 2023. “That’s twice as much as during the 2010 decade. Historic! » And we could add that“no savings are announced by the government for the hospital”as stated by the Minister of Health [François Braun] October 19 in the Senate.
Behind the words, we must look for the facts. When inflation is 6% and the budget increases by 4%, this amounts to saving 2%, or between 1 and 2 billion, at the hospital. The Social Security financing bill (PLFSS) will therefore worsen the situation of health establishments, as has already been pointed out by the French Hospital Federation. Personnel expenses (between 58% and 65% of the establishments’ budget) are the first item of hospital expenditure. We can better understand why the unanimous demand from caregivers and patients to obtain staff adapted to the activity has no chance of being translated into action.
What is historic is that, for lack of numbers, the nursing staff desert the public hospital, in which they no longer find a satisfactory exercise. When 70% of nurses leaving school could join the hospital ten years ago, they are now only 40%. History! When almost 80% of hospital nurses were still working three years after their recruitment, they are only 65%. History! All successive governments, including the current government, have closed beds in order to reduce personnel costs. And now the beds remain closed due to lack of staff. History!
Degraded conditions
Thus, the hospital can no longer accommodate either the expected winter epidemics or strokes. “usual”, and constantly pushes back the essential care of patients with chronic diseases. For lack of beds, hospital doctors exercise their activity in degraded and precarious conditions: they carry out a triage which does not say its name. They monitor on an outpatient basis and without a safety net a growing number of patients whose state of health would justify hospitalization. Physicians thus assume medical tragedies that result from political decisions. This abandonment of a constitutional right – the care and welfare of citizens – is indeed historic.
This deterioration in the hospital situation risks leading to the disappearance of whole sections of activities and know-how of which the public hospital is the only operator. The crisis in pediatrics today foreshadows what will happen tomorrow for the entire public hospital.
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