Mobilization for hospitals: “I have been a nurse for five years, I have the impression that it makes fifty” – Le Monde

In Marseille, “we bend, we take it, but here we are facing the wall” “If someone asks me what I want right away, I answer: doctors! Head of the Timone emergency department in Marseille since last February, Dr. Céline Meguerditchian juggles, like every day, with her duty rosters. Today, four emergency doctors are present, plus an orthopedic doctor who runs the trauma line. “We should be nine, but we have reorganized to ensure continuity and respect working times”, assures this 42-year-old Marseillaise. Since midnight, eighty patients have come to the service. “At 11 a.m., thirty-five are in the emergency room. After the long weekend, I was afraid it would be more complicated, but for now it’s calm, ”she notes. The saturation threshold is set at sixty patients. Here, with an average of 250 passages per day, it is regularly reached. “Emergencies are the showcase of the health system. We are at the crossroads of city medicine and the hospital. We suffer from deficiencies in both sectors. And here, the symptoms are seen more than in a service on the sixth floor or in a general practitioner’s office, ”recognizes Céline Meguerditchian. During the Pentecost weekend, a patient arrived by ambulance from Seine-et-Marne. “A dysfunction that had to be managed,” she breathes, helpless in the face of such scenarios. Céline Meguerditchian, head of the Timone department, in Marseille, June 7, 2022. OLIVIER MONGE / MYOP FOR “THE WORLD” Deputy head of the department, Gilles Gambini, 51, who practiced emergency medicine for twenty-three years already, believes, for his part, that the crisis that the hospital is going through “is unprecedented”. “We had staffing problems, we saw attendance increase, but never like that,” he said. “We started asking for temporary workers… who told us after a few days that they didn’t want to come back. Like other doctors in the service, he gave up his Christmas holidays and reduced his summer vacation from three weeks to fifteen days. “We fold, we cash in, but here we are facing the wall. And what’s new is that it’s the same everywhere,” he notes. For this emergency physician, the partial and temporary closure of the Bordeaux emergency services was a “shock”. “To see a CHU being affected was brutal. Here, we do everything so that the service does not close. With a small salt-and-pepper beard behind his mask, he takes a few minutes in his office to answer questions and escape the incessant solicitations for a moment. “By reducing the number of doctors, each of us necessarily has to take care of more patients. Having twelve, thirteen, fourteen in active line is not ideal. There is the risk of poorer follow-up. “Today, the problem is how we spend the summer, but above all what are we doing for the future? » he concludes, worried to see the load which already weighs on the junior doctors of the service. “Will they want to continue with us? » Gilles Rof (Marseille, correspondent)