“The days follow each other but are really not alike” in the emergency room, slips Jordan Gendre, a 38-year-old hospital practitioner, his gaze still alert despite the late hour. Nights even less, in these hospital services which welcome patients 24 hours a day. This is what makes the salt of the trade, for the emergency doctors of La Roche-sur-Yon installed around a strawberry pie this Saturday July 30, in the basement of the Departmental Hospital Center (CHD), a few steps from the SAMU room. It’s 2:30 in the morning. Finally, they have a few minutes to breathe and swallow a semblance of a meal after a violent rush during which everything accelerated.
“Tourists must go to bed now”, laughs a male nurse. On second thought, these are only ” local “ which the latter has taken care of in recent hours with the mobile emergency and resuscitation structure (SMUR). Motorcycle accident, attempted suicide with medication, internal bleeding after a malaise… Everything seems to have concentrated around midnight, when the SAMU control room, which receives calls on 15 and 116 117 (general medicine), was already in turmoil to respond to the many summer calls of this tourist department.
The year is special: Vendée caregivers witness an explosion compared to the previous summer, with 30% more calls in July. And busy days in the emergency room, like this record Monday of July 18. It has remained etched in the minds of many caregivers: « 233 entrées », dont “76 files just overnight! »repeats a caregiver.
A week ago, the decision was taken: to preserve the emergencies, suffering from the lack of emergency physicians (40 positions are vacant out of 100 in the department), a filter at the entrance to the services is put in place from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. Since July 22, the population must go through the emergency call numbers before being admitted. Those who present themselves meet closed doors, and must activate the telephone installed at the entrance to obtain a green light from 15, or be redirected. And this, in all the Vendée services in La-Roche-Sur-Yon as in Sables-d’Olonne, or even in Challans, Fontenay-le-Comte and Luçon, where it generally starts earlier, at the end of afternoon, as in Montaigu, whose service is closed at night.
“We are not immune to making mistakes”
“It was the worst regulation of my life”, loose the emergency doctor Camille Brunellière, who returns from an intervention with a man victim of a motorcycle accident, taken since to the operating room. But it is not for this reason that his evening was rough, nor because the vital emergency room, the “SAUV”, was filled in barely thirty minutes with three patients at the same time, including his own, as this rarely happens. For the 31-year-old doctor, ” the horror “it was before: those long hours of having to manage a flow of calls that never stopped. “I was asked for things in all directions, it was permanent work interruptions”, she says. No other doctor could help him, since his two emergency physician colleagues were in SMUR intervention. And so there was no SMUR team left to send in when needed. We had to juggle.
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