“Colleagues are demotivated, humanly exhausted. We can’t take it anymore,” said one of the doctor negotiators, who wished to remain anonymous. It has already been more than three weeks since the emergency department of Brest University Hospital is facing a strike by emergency doctors. Objective of the movement: to denounce a “gruesome organization” of the territory’s health network, against a backdrop of a glaring lack of staff.
According to one of the strikers, a third of the workforce (18 full-time equivalents out of 54) are not filled and “the resource of temporary doctors has dried up” since the entry into force of the Rist law which caps the salary of temporary doctors. at the hospital at 1,390 euros gross for 24 hours of care. In this tense context, “governance and supervision have decided, without consulting those on the ground, on an eccentric organization” in order to “respond to political pressure”, denounce the doctors in a press release.
At issue: a memorandum of understanding signed at the end of October, providing for the “short-term” return of two emergency doctors “24 hours a day” to the Carhaix hospital (Finistère). Since the summer, residents and elected officials of this small town in Central Brittany have denounced the regulated access to the hospital’s emergency rooms, in the evening and at night, through a prior call from patients to 15, for lack of staff.
“Health nonsense”
For the doctors, this “imposed action plan” was to the “detriment of certain critical lines of care” at the Brest University Hospital, sometimes leading to having “a single emergency practitioner in SAMU medical regulation for several hours” for “the entire department of Finistère”. “This health nonsense coupled with the lack of consideration (…) towards emergency doctors has exacerbated” weariness “among these practitioners who work more than 60 hours per week,” they denounce.
Started on November 7, the strike movement led to the activation of White plan by the CHU, due to lack of staff. Since then, negotiations have not been successful. “We no longer have a contact person in front of us,” said the doctor interviewed, who asked for “an improvement in the attractiveness of the CHU” and in the reception of patients, in order to attract new doctors.
“The deterioration of the provision of care in this health area is superimposed on that which we are experiencing everywhere else following the policies carried out for several decades based on organized and managed rationing of the provision of care,” commented Jean-François Cibien , president of the inter-union Action Praticien Hôpital (APH).