“Mr. President, your silence is deafening”, the letter from 10,000 caregivers to Emmanuel Macron

MMr President, on October 21, after only two weeks of usual and predictable winter epidemics, we wrote to you to alert you to the precarious situation of paediatrics, the risks and loss of opportunity already incurred by children, and the resulting desperation of caregivers.

A month later, we have no response from you: your silence is deafening.

Throughout this month, we have been confronted with what we dared not imagine: daily, children hospitalized on stretchers or on their parents’ knees in the emergency room, in an office refitted for the occasion, children intubated and hospitalized without a room in the intensive care corridor, too late care and precarious care, premature returns home and disaster returns of children sent home for lack of space, dozens of transfers out of sectors in intensive care , but also in conventional hospitalization.

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We thought that transferring children 300 kilometers from home was a major degradation of care, we now see that there could be worse: no longer being able to transfer because the epidemic has swept everywhere, saturating all pediatric services French. We used to feel guilty sending teenagers to adult services, now we are sending children aged 3 years old.

Eternal adjustment variable

And again, always, cancellations of care, postponements of surgery as the only response of our guardianship to the emergency, to the detriment of children with disabilities, chronic illnesses and child psychiatry, now permanent valve of the hospital, eternal adjustment variable.

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At the end of November, the reminders of caregivers barely out of the hospital to come and help the following night were not enough, it was the adult intensive care nurses who came to the rescue: they had never treated a child, whom Never mind, they will now take care of infants in intensive care.

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The annual bronchiolitis epidemic has turned into a bad remake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Except that this time, there is no alternative to save the hospital, liberal pediatrics is drowned in the wave, private hospitalization in pediatrics is non-existent because it is not profitable. And you did not appear to reassure parents, assure caregivers of your support and the desire to save the public hospital. Instead, your government is piling up envelopes and temporary emergency measures as the disaster progresses, and challenges the unanimous findings of caregivers and patients, threatening them on the front page of public inquiry newspapers.

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