For months, internal crises have been shaking Joseph Ducuing Hospital, In Toulouse. After a long emergency strike in 2019, the closure last December of its general medicine department and the departure of several practitioners ended up sealing the break between the nursing staff and the management of this private non-profit establishment.
To put an end to the deleterious atmosphere that reigned within the day hospital (HDJ), the Association of Friends of Social Medicine (AMS), owner and manager of this hospital with 600 employees, decided to separate from its director and renewed its office on February 23. With the ambition to turn the page, to rebalance the accounts thanks to a new medical project, carried by all of its actors.
New priorities set
“The strength of this hospital is that we treat everyone. With the CHU, we are the only ones in the Toulouse conurbation to be in sector 1, without practicing excess fees ”, highlights Claudine Regourd, the new president of the AMS. A social position, without being a ghetto hospital, in accordance with the idea of a militant hospital and social medicine, which presided over its creation in 1944 by Spanish republican fighters and resistance fighters.
Since then, it has become known to the population through some of its services, whether palliative care, the fight against tuberculosis, addictology or even thanks to its maternity, the third in Haute-Garonne with 2,500 births per year.
The new roadmap has thus set the objective of increasing to 3,000 births in the coming years, thanks in particular to the opening of a sixth delivery room and the recruitment of dedicated personnel. Hirings which are also on the program of the establishment to restore its medical service.
“Its reconstruction is one of our priorities. It will reopen gradually, with four beds from Monday, we would like to be at full capacity, i.e. 36 beds, at the end of December, at the beginning of January, ”explains Cathy Garcia, the new director who launched the recruitments. With the ambition to regain its 2019 capacity of 1,700 daily hospitalizations, but also the 3,000 internal medicine consultations.
The consolidation of emergencies or the development of orthopedic surgery activity are also part of the projects of Joseph-Ducuing, who for a private establishment, has the particularity of paying its doctors. “We are not going to copy and paste what existed before, we leave ourselves to 2022 to see what will be best”, insists Marie-Josée Ferro-Collados, addictologist and representative of the hundred or so practitioners at the establishment’s medical committee.