“The establishment enters into a total shutdown of activity from June 3. » The posters posted on the posts in the hall of the Seine-Saint-Denis private hospital, on the border of the popular communes of Blanc-Mesnil and Drancy, appeal to patients. They are found on all floors of the establishment, which belongs to one of the main players in the private for-profit sector, the Ramsay Santé group, which has seven clinics in Seine-Saint-Denis, including three offering a range of medicine, surgery and obstetrics.
“If we can’t make ourselves heard, I die”, cowardly, with gravity, the director. It has been six years since Yves Pinot took the helm of this private hospital anchored in one of the most disadvantaged departments in the country, vast “medical desert”. And the “new rates” announced by the government at the end of March, an increase of 0.3% for its sector, compared to + 4.3% in the non-profit sector, did not pass.
Lucrative ? It has been a long time since his establishment, which has some 200 beds and places and 80 private practitioners, has been there. With a very particular model: surgical activity is significant, with nine operating theaters which are running at full capacity, but also a large “2b” level maternity ward (capable of receiving high-risk pregnancies with a neonatal intensive care service), not forgetting an emergency department which handles 27,000 visits per year.
In front of his computer, Yves Pinot points to the columns of negative figures: 4.4 million euros deficit in 2020-2021 (the budget is calculated the Anglo-Saxon way, over two years); 5.7 million euros in 2021-2022; 7.6 million euros in 2022-2023… for an annual turnover of 34 million euros. The equation seems more and more untenable. The increase in electricity prices, “consumables” (gowns, sterile medical devices, etc.), biomedical equipment, etc. “Everything went up in flames”, he explains. And as in public establishments, at home, resuming activity after the Covid-19 crisis was not easy: “We have just found in recent months the level of 2019.”
No margin on hotel service
Concerning profitability, half of its turnover comes from maternity activity, with care starting to rise again since the closure of the Vauban clinic, in Livry-Gargan, a few months ago; followed by orthopedics, gastroenterology and visceral. The two medicine services (multipurpose and internal) are not “not at all lucrative”he euphemizes, with long “average lengths of stay”, as they say in hospital jargon, of seven to eight days on average. “But they are essential”he maintains.
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