The increase in the number of Covid cases in recent weeks is not enough to reassure the emergency services, already in great difficulty. At least 120 of them have already limited their activities due to lack of staff. And with the holidays, it does not get better. For the slightest ailment, the reflex is always to go to the emergency room. In the Vendée, we are trying to encourage patients not to resort to it systematically. From now on, patients must call 15 or 116.117 to make an appointment.
Non-vital emergencies
“Samu, I’m listening. What’s going on with you?” On the ground floor of La Roche-sur-Yon hospital is the Samu regulation room. All calls to 15 end here. But since this year, you can also call for non-vital emergencies. “I don’t have a dentist available. What I can do is create a file, put you on the phone with a doctor who can provide you with painkillers, is that what you want?” asks Julien, the operator.
The doctor in question is only a few meters away from him. And if the patient here needs to see a real doctor, but she has no attending physician, then an appointment will be given to her in one of the six unscheduled care centers open in the department.
“Care in the right place, by the right healthcare professional”
“It concerns patients who do not have a doctor or who are passing through the territory and whose doctor is in another region and who have an acute medical problem. They call the regulation at 15 or 116.117 which goes, if necessary, refer them to a general medical consultation”, explains Romain Bossy, vice-president of the Territorial Professional Health Community. “There’s no reason for them to go to the ER for anything that isn’t an ER. So it’s really getting care in the right place, at the right time, by the right healthcare professional.”
In these centres, which offer a hundred slots a day, retired general practitioners and interns in training work, all paid on a part-time basis by the hospital. In Vendée, 80,000 inhabitants have no attending physician.