Lhe President of the Republic presented his wishes to the health players on 6 January. He repeated the mantra that the hospital would hold. If to hold is to offer degraded medicine, if to hold is to let patients die for lack of care, if to hold is to leave the sick piled up on stretchers, if to hold is to cancel or postpone scheduled visits, if to hold it’s scaring away the staff, so, yes, the hospital held out. If holding is to respond to needs and requests according to the rules of the art, if holding is to have enough personnel and beds available, if holding is to ensure emergencies in dignified conditions, if holding is to remain attractive, then, no, the hospital did not hold. It is even on the way to collapse. Certainly, the Head of State does not remain in denial and shows that he knows some of the difficulties of the public hospital, but one can wonder if he really measures the extent.
We had been naive enough to imagine a post-pandemic world different from the world before. With others, we wrote as early as May 2020: “Let’s put an end to this policy of profitability of stays, useful or not, as long as they “pay off”! Let’s put an end to the useless requests for “reporting”, Coding and Reporting! Let’s put an end to the just-in-time hospital! We must increase the number of beds and expand the care teams. Administrative time must be reduced in favor of precious care and research time. » Recent legislative developments, in particular the Rist law of April 26, 2021, have seemed timorous, and above all this text is not applied with zeal by hospital governance, which has a conservative attitude, particularly with regard to services, which should again become the direct interlocutors of the administration. Caregivers have the feeling that old and bad habits have come back at a gallop as soon as the height of the crisis due to Covid-19 has passed.
We have been more than 5,000 caregivers to make proposals recently, in these columns: the assignment of agents to a care service, the basic cell of the hospital, as the President of the Republic reminded us, condition to find recognition and give meaning to their work; a maximum ratio of patients per nurse, so that the workload is not a dissuasive factor; put an end to the director “the only boss in the hospital”; modulation of revenue allocated to institutions based on simplified criteria.
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