The staff of the CHR of Metz-Thionville, in Moselle, will have reinforcements. The acting director general announced on Tuesday the recruitment of 6 nurses and 6 nursing assistants for emergencies, whose staff have massively declared themselves on sick leave.
“We will have to create 6 nursing stations in order to ensure 24-hour activity and care, as well as (…) 6 caregivers who are required to work on patient care functions but also bond with the families,” said David Larivière.
“You don’t make a revolution in 24 hours”
“This corresponds to the request that was made by the team, we responded favorably,” added the interim director general of the CHR. “We have also considered in-house solutions to better organize the premises and therefore extend the patient care areas”.
“Many proposals have been made, they bring hope,” reacted Philippe Alarcon, head of the Thionville emergency department, present at the press conference. “But we don’t make a revolution in 24 hours, the situation is quite similar in other French establishments”.
Measures deemed “insufficient” by Sud-Santé
“These measures are completely insufficient”, reacted against Patricia Schneider, delegate Sud-Santé. “The 6 nursing assistants will not only perform tasks in the emergency room but also in other departments, and the 6 nursing positions are not permanent but temporary. The director himself admitted in a meeting that he had no long-term measures to propose”.
From December 30, 55 nurses and nursing assistants out of 59 (i.e. 93%) of Thionville emergencies were placed on sick leave, sometimes by decision of the emergency room doctors themselves. The caregivers interviewed expressed their “physical and psychological exhaustion” in the face of the difficulties of caring for patients in a service which regularly records more than 100 visits per day but has only 12 reception boxes, and in an establishment which lacks hospital beds. Several caregivers, for example, reported a 90-year-old patient who remained “more than 90 hours” on a stretcher, and who “was only changed once” during this period.
The director of ARS Grand-Est, Virginie Cayré, has also announced that the new director general of the CHR of Metz-Thionville will be appointed “by the end of January”, for a start “at the most late at the end of March”.