More than 600 French hospital doctors have threatened to resign if the government does not increase health funding, as striking medics prepare to take to the streets this week across the nation.
The doctors said that budget cuts, bed closures and staff shortages are bringing France’s health system to the brink of collapse and putting patients’ lives at risk.
“Public hospitals in France are dying,” 660 medics from hospitals across the nation wrote in an unprecedented open letter, saying funding cuts were threatening patient safety in what was once seen as one of the best healthcare systems in the world.
HOSPITAL STRIKES
Doctors are calling for urgent government talks after nine months of hospital strikes, which began in March in emergency rooms and have since spread across departments from pediatrics to psychiatry, with junior doctors joining this month and no end in sight.
Tomorrow, medics are to march across the nation carrying banners saying: “Public hospitals: a life-threatening emergency.”
The long-running healthcare strikes are proving a major headache to French President Emmanuel Macron, with rail workers now adding to his troubles by carrying out nationwide stoppages against pension changes.
Macron’s pledge last month of more hospital funding and staff bonuses was rejected by doctors’ groups as not enough.
In 2000, the WHO ranked France’s health system the best of 191 countries. However, a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, published in the Lancet medical journal in 2017, placed it in 15th place for quality of care.
“For years we’ve watched from afar with a lot of empathy as UK healthcare staff struggle under NHS [National Health Service[ funding cuts,” said Cathy Le Gac, a Solidaires Unitaires Democratiques union representative who worked for 19 years as a trauma nurse, dealing with serious car crash accidents north of Paris. “And yet, now in France, funding cuts mean we’re seeing similar problems to our NHS colleagues.”
For many years, governments on the right and left have reduced funding. Public hospitals in France have been forced to cut 9 billion euros (US$10 billion) in spending since 2005, leading to the scrapping of hundreds of beds and dozens of operating theaters, while stagnant salaries fueled a flight to the private sector.
Emergency room staff complain of elderly patients being left for hours on trolleys in corridors, not enough equipment, increased waiting times for operations and even deaths.
At one Paris hospital this year, medics blamed staff shortages for the death of a 55-year-old woman on a trolley in a corridor, while the hospital management maintained staffing numbers were fine.
Doctors also warn of staff suicides. More than 400 medical staff marched in Flers, Normandy, in September, after a senior member of the psychiatry department took his life with colleagues blaming poor working conditions.
Adeline, 36, a nurse in a hospital in the south of Paris, said that despite looking after aging patients with multiple issues, staff shortages and cuts meant there was not enough time for proper equipment or washing patients.
“We used to have big towels, now there are small towels that don’t dry; our machines for reading blood pressure are old and there aren’t enough of them,” she said. “Even crucial cream for our patients’ private areas, to prevent sores — we used to have large tubs and are now given small tubes. Some services have no more bin bags. The idea seems to be rot the health system from the inside and then say it doesn’t work.”
LOW PAY
Like many nurses — whose pay is lower than in countries such as Germany, and who often live on the periphery of towns, struggling to make ends meet — Adeline took part in the anti-government protests earlier this year. Unions said many nurses were quitting the profession due to burnout.
In an effort to calm the tension, Macron has shifted his approach to the hospital crisis. For months he had maintained that hospitals and emergency rooms were struggling principally due to the way healthcare was organized, citing the lack of general doctors who should be treating patients in towns and rural areas, but last month, he also acknowledged the need for more funding.
“We must invest more than we first envisaged because the situation is worst than we had thought,” he said.
However, the government’s promise to give an extra 1.5 billion euros over three years, including staff bonuses, was brushed aside as too little by medics, who vowed to continue the protests.
The government also promised to absorb 10 billion euros bn of debt from public hospitals.
About 87 percent of the public support the hospital strikes, according to ViaVoice pollsters, with people deeply concerned about protecting universal healthcare as a pillar of the social system.
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