2024-02-19 04:15:06
Intervention at the Timone hospital, in Marseille, February 6, 2024. FRANCE KEYSER FOR “LE MONDE”
A dizzying deficit is emerging: around a hundred million euros, for Marseille Public Assistance-Hospitals (AP-HM). “We have real concerns”, recognizes the director of the hospital juggernaut in the South-East, François Crémieux, who is nevertheless experienced in crisis situations. Like the thirty university hospital centers (CHU) which alerted at the end of January about unprecedented deficits, its accounts have plunged.
The AP-HM deficit increased from 52 million euros in 2022 to 117 million in 2023, according to forecast figures from the hospital group. At a press conference on February 5, its leaders called for a “exceptional support” of the State, while the Marseille institution, whose budget represents 1.8 billion euros, is just regaining its colors, two years after the end of the crisis due to Covid-19. Since the end of December 2023, thanks to a successful caregiver recruitment campaign, the AP-HM has managed to reopen almost all of its “beds”, in medicine, surgery, obstetrics and pediatrics. And its activity is finally approaching that of 2019.
How to explain this dip? Inflation, inflation, inflation: Marie Deugnier, the general secretary, who oversees administrative services, from purchasing to finance to human resources, can illustrate it at all levels, costs are exploding. “It’s not just heating or electricity, points the finger at the 44-year-old manager, installed in the management premises which adjoin Conception, one of the AP-HM hospitals. We are like a household, we have plenty of other consumer goods and services. » A household with 500 million euros of purchases per year! Increase in operating prices for IT, maintenance of biomedical equipment (MRI, scanner, respirators, etc.), the cost of the vehicle fleet, medical and pharmaceutical goods, food purchases… inflation represented 25 million euros of the current deficit, assesses the Marseille University Hospital.
The consequences are already there, with cash flow compromised: payment deadlines can no longer be met with many suppliers. On average at fifty days, they now record peaks at one hundred and twenty days, which could reach one hundred and fifty days during the summer. “We are preserving vital purchases, but it is extremely fine management on a daily basis, describes the person responsible. Financial difficulties have a hidden cost: much more cumbersome management processes, permanent arbitrations… and during that time, we don’t do anything else. »
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