Corentyn Ayrault has just completed a ninety hour week of work. Another one and it will be, for the anesthesia-resuscitation intern, the end of his internship in the central emergency room and at the Pitié-Salpêtrière maternity unit (Public Assistance-Hospitals of Paris, AP-HP). Also the end of a tunnel of three weeks in a row at an extreme pace, without stopping except for the mandatory safety rest, ” to sleep “ after twenty-four hours on call.
Since the third wave of the epidemic hits Ile-de-France head-on, the 26-year-old has agreed to go and help, in addition to his semester in anesthesia, in an intensive care unit in his hospital, overwhelmed. by the influx of patients with Covid-19.
These young doctors who carry out their internship – after the sixth year of medical studies – in different departments for at least three years, at a half-yearly rate, have been on the front line since the start of the epidemic crisis which has shaken the hospital. But far from the momentum of the first wave, wear and tear dominate. With a particular signal in Ile-de-France, where they could be lacking in certain resuscitation services in the days to come.
“Of course, apart from the glory, we don’t have much”, testifies the intern from Ile-de-France, a little disgusted, who recalls that he is “Paid the same” regardless of the number of hours aligned. “I do it because I know that it helps, but it’s true that I’m a bit at the end of the line”, he admits, after a year on the Covid-19 front. Work conditions “To make you cry” weigh more and more heavily. Protective paper clothes, no canteen, plastic bed to rest on guard … “We work in intensive care units that are so painful that we have to put two patients in the same room, we have no choice, but it’s dangerous, he blurted out. It is mind boggling. “
“The Covid has taken precedence over all other pathologies”
On May 3, at the time of the change of internship of all interns deployed in the French hospital system, Corentyn Ayrault will go to anesthesia in Bordeaux, hoping to escape Covid-19. In Ile-de-France, he was not the only one to make this choice: in a relatively new way, to hear some doctors, several intensive care units will find themselves without an intern, or with much fewer young doctors than semester that has just passed. Vacancies exist permanently, the number of open internships always being at least 7% higher than the workforce, but this time the disaffection strongly affects resuscitation under the fire of the third epidemic wave.
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