ReportageIn Orléans, in the Loiret department, severely affected by medical desertification, caregivers are exhausted. Beyond the most visible crisis, that of emergencies, they describe a system that is heading towards a “catastrophe”.
Coline Boucher, 29, sat on an empty bed in an emergency room one morning quieter than the others. She dusted the mattress before settling down. A moment of respite. And of cold, deep anger, of those which make change life. A nurse for six years, she will leave the Orleans hospital. The ras-le-bol prevailed. Lack of consideration. The absence of prospects. Post-Covid-19 exhaustion.
Coline Boucher recounts her first sick leave, in December 2021. She describes the tears in the service, of nurses or doctors, in the morning before taking up their post, on full duty, or in the evening in the toilets, when colleagues erase the traces on their make-up by saying: “No, no, it’s nothing, don’t worry. » “The personal cost is so high. The days are so hard. I didn’t want to go out anymore, I just wanted to go home. »
What will she do next? She does not know. “Maybe interim. » But she leaves knowing what she no longer wants to bear. “The trigger, for me, was to realize that I had changed and that basically I was no longer a caregiver at all. I felt annoyed when patients asked for water. When the families called, I didn’t have the strength to answer. I didn’t even want to listen anymore. I’m leaving to save myself, so as not to suffer, so as not to come with a lump in my stomach. » Coline Boucher let a moment pass. “I see that we are pawns, we are names in squares. »
The words of the young nurse join those of many others in Orléans, spoken in the middle of a call, in the laughter and the warmth of a rest room, during a cigarette break, in the deceptive calm of motherhood, in the hubbub of emergency care, in the hustle and bustle of services or the silence of medical practices in town.
These are words that take different paths, but which all end up expressing the same fear: the death of the public hospital, like that of a patient whose prognosis is no longer in doubt, the social body worn out, institutional bodies failing, hope gone.
Wave of caregiver departures
Nurses. Doctors. Midwives. Nursing aides. Wise old people. Novices. Chiefs. Unranked. All, or almost, recount the spiral of failures, shortcomings, political choices too, which lead the healthcare system as a whole, not just the hospital, to the brink of “drowning”from « catastrophe »of the’“indignity” and some “abuse” – this term that often comes up about patients and caregivers themselves.
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