A short reprieve, but a reprieve nonetheless. While the Lilas maternity hospital was to cease its activity in June 2022 due to a deficit, dilapidated premises, and for still not having found, after ten years, a hospital establishment to lean on, Cécile Lambert, director of the care offer of the regional health agency (ARS) Ile-de-France ad interim, announced at the end of April to a delegation of staff and elected officials meeting at the Ministry of Health, that it was granting him a suspension of up to one year. That is to say until June 2023. Something to reassure, at least for a time, professionals and users who came to demonstrate that day against the closure of their “mater”.
Founded in 1964 by the Countess of Charnière, acquired in the method of “painless childbirth”, the “Lilas” is a real institution. But his model, based on the possibility for women to give birth in a physiological way, requires the permanent presence of midwives during childbirth, an approach incompatible with the profitability requirements of the ARS. “It’s an interesting project, but the cost of giving birth is twice as high. This breaks equity with women in the rest of the territory”, argues a former ARS. In 2021, 1,107 women gave birth there, and 600 abortions were performed there.
Between ARS Ile-de-France and maternity, relations have always been complicated. From the creation of the agency, in 2010, the latter the sum to lean on another hospital structure, to find if not profitability, at least financial balance, and safer working conditions. , its premises no longer being up to standard. In 2011, she prevents the reconstruction of the maternity ward to the Lilas, because the project does not provide for the merger with another structure.
An “unbalanced” lease
“The management of the Lilas maternity file by the ARS Ile-de-France, for fifteen years, is a financial mismanagement”, insists Lionel Benharous, the mayor (Socialist Party) of the Lilas, facing the cluster of demonstrators gathered in front of the ministry, at the end of April. Without a solution, but blocked by the symbolic charge, the ARS supports the maternity treasury each year to the tune of 4.5 million euros, or a third of its 12 million euros budget.
This “mismanagement”a report commissioned from Syndex by the social and economic committee and the unions, and submitted in November 2021, obtained by The world, makes it possible to make an X-ray. Among the heavy charges of maternity, the rent of its walls acquired in the 1970s, by three former employees and by its then judicial administrator, Pierre Zecri, president of the company of judicial administrators.
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