The emergency room crisis, the most visible sign of a system that has become obsolete

2023-04-25 19:54:38

By Soline Roy

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1 hour ago
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Update 1 hour ago

“Emergency services were created in the 1950s, initially to regulate access to hospital for patients arriving unexpectedly and without satisfactory medical conditioning”explains François Danet, psychiatrist and health sociologist. lev dolgachov/Syda Productions – stock.adobe.com

DECRYPTION – Born in the 1950s, emergencies were first designed to deal with very acute situations.

«The emergency crisis is the pimple on the nose that hides a generalized cancer”a doctor laughs yellow. “It is only the visible part of a deeper structural crisis which affects the entire response to urgent care and unscheduled care needs and more broadly our entire health system”stated in a more consensual way the emergency physician François Braun, not yet Minister of Health, in the flash mission he had piloted in June 2022. And, in fact, the promise made by Emmanuel Macron on April 17 (“By the end of next year, we should have decongested all our emergency services”) seems very unrealistic, as emergencies have become the receptacle for a whole range of dysfunctions and shortcomings in the entire care chain.

Born in the 1950s, emergencies (from pre-hospital, with telephone regulation and emergency dispatch, to patient care within the hospital) were first designed…

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