The alarm bell had been sounded for a while, the report is now there. “We are missing 1,400 nurses compared to what we would like to have,” said AP-HP director general Martin Hirsch on France Inter radio on Monday. In detail, the Ile-de-France hospital group has 1,000 fewer nurses than a year ago at the same time. “We had planned to create 400 additional positions, we could not create them,” he adds.
“There are some who have changed jobs, there are some who have gone into the private sector, there are some who have gone to the provinces, there are some who have not come to work after ‘graduating’ from last summer (…) and there are many who use this soft drug of the interim, which puts us in an absolutely terrible situation, ”added Martin Hirsch. At the AP-HP, 15% beds remain closed on average, for lack of carers, he underlined, while hospitals across France are warning about the lack of staff for this summer in emergency services.
The flight to the interim
“Before, when you graduated, you weren’t allowed to work as a temporary worker. Temporary worker in health professions where there is no unemployment […]that means: “I choose to work when I want, when I can, paid three times more than the others”, commented Martin Hirsch, who described the temporary workers as “mercenaries”.
Health is one of the three “emergencies” which the government must tackle, alongside the climate and purchasing power, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Friday, at the end of a region in Matignon with her government. . Faced with the shortage of personnel in hospitals, she assured, at the end of this meeting, that she had asked the “ministers concerned” to “make proposals very quickly to take effective measures for the summer”.