We wrote about it again in October: in France, women who have just given birth find themselves on the street, due to a lack of emergency accommodation, their situation not being deemed “priority” by 115, the emergency services. the State which allocates places to homeless people. It is to avoid the worst that maternity hospitals in the north-east of Ile-de-France are mobilizing, keeping these women and their babies for dozens of days, an “unmanageable” situation denounced by caregivers.
“Our maternity ward was transformed, over the weeks, into an emergency accommodation center. Homeless patients have occupied post-delivery and high-risk pregnancy beds, not out of a need for care, but because no accommodation solution was offered to them by the state, department or city. » wrote midwives from the maternity ward of Delafontaine hospital in Saint-Denis at the end of October in a letter to the Ministry of Health.
50 migrant women housed in maternity hospitals in Ile-de-France
Up to twenty homeless women and their infants were in September, without medical reason, in post-partum and pathological pregnancy wards – on around sixty beds -, sometimes accommodated “up to 70 days”, they write.
Since 2019, the Regional Health Agency (ARS) has measured every Tuesday the number of homeless women affected in 27 of the 45 public maternity hospitals in Ile-de-France. The total number is generally “around 20 or 30, but in recent weeks we have observed a sharp increase, recently up to 50 women,” indicates the ARS. Comparing “similar periods of autumn”, this figure was 15 women in 2021, 30 in 2022, and 50 in 2023, the problem focusing on the north-east of Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis and the Val-d’Oise, specifies the Agency.
According to a “flash survey” carried out on July 4 and obtained by AFP, the average length of hospitalization for young homeless mothers was 14 days (compared to 3 to 5 normally), and exceeded 18 days in seven hospitals including Robert Debré and Lariboisière in Paris, or those of Saint-Denis, Montfermeil and Aulnay-sous-Bois. To relieve these establishments, the ARS “asks all maternity wards” to get involved, “develops medico-social teams” and has “110” medical places. But the crux of the problem is the emergency accommodation crisis.
An accommodation center closed for budgetary reasons
“Here, many hotels contracted with the State are now giving up reception 115, to carry out work in preparation for the Olympic Games,” notes the communist deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis Stéphane Peu to AFP. , co-author of a report on the subject.
At the same time, an accommodation center where these young mothers were given priority in Neuilly-sur-Marne (Seine-Saint-Denis) “closed in June for budgetary reasons”, deplores the MP.
According to Stéphane Peu’s parliamentary report, at the end of 2022 the State had 118,000 emergency accommodation places, including 50,000 in hotels. The number of hotel rooms has increased by 25% since the end of 2017, mainly during the Covid-19 epidemic, but began to decrease in 2022 (-2,500 rooms).
1,000 unfilled requests per day
When questioned, the Ile-de-France prefecture refutes any link with the Olympic Games. Hotels, very “mobilized during the health crisis in a context of cessation of their commercial activities”, saw the return of tourists, which “was expected”, she explains to AFP.
Services “are mobilized to anticipate this contraction” with more “sustainable” solutions, she continues, ensuring that they have already created 750 places in accommodation centers in 2022-2023. The total volume was “almost the same” in 2023 as in 2022, and “additional resources” are allocated for the winter. Despite everything, “the tension remains very high”, and unfilled requests can “exceed 1,000 per day in Paris”, she admits.
Among the “priority groups”, pregnant women or women leaving maternity leave have 2,000 dedicated places in Ile-de-France (30 million euros budget), adds the prefecture, and “specific work is underway to find additional places”.