Are French hospitals ready to receive Ebola patients? The case of the French MSF nurse cared for at the Bégin hospital is rather reassuring in this regard. And the Minister of Health is convinced of it.
However, Marisol Touraine announced on i-TV that a “life-size exercise in all the emergency services” was going to be organized within eight days. “In this way, we can see if there are things to improve in certain places,” she said. “The exercise will be in all Samu and reference health establishments,” said a spokesperson for the ministry. France now has 12 reference hospitals (Bichat and Necker in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Strasbourg, Marseille, Bordeaux, Rennes, Reunion, Rouen, Nancy and the Bégin Army Training Hospital in Saint-Mandé, near Paris).
This will not be a first, specified Marisol Touraine, but “it is a question very regularly of checking that our system is in place”. This life-size exercise also has the mission of reassuring. The French, but also health professionals. Because they also have concerns. Surgeons and anesthetists-resuscitators at Bichat Hospital (Paris) wrote a letter to Martin Hirsch, head of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), in which they claim that their establishment is unable to “ensure an appropriate and sufficient level of care for contagious patients”. They also denounce “the lack of preparation, training and training of caregivers to take care of this type of patient” and finally, during “the circuit” of potential patients to be transferred from one unit to another, ” the risk of spreading the infection” would be “major”.
Bichat Hospital replied to them in the voice of Professor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the infectious diseases department: “It is not true that we are not ready. Honestly, the risk of contagion is close to zero because the circuit is ultra secure. »
But, at the Bichat hospital as at the Ministry of Health, we understood it well. A wind of psychosis is touching France. It is urgent to show that the health authorities have the situation under control. All the more so at a time when voices are being raised to affirm that the WHO and the rich countries have dramatically underestimated the Ebola epidemic.
