The health of French hospitals is fragile. That of their employees too, according to the data compiled by the Hospi Diag site, and analyzed by Le Figaro. The average cumulative sick leave is close to 24 days per employee. And according to the daily, 22 hospitals would exceed 30 days per year and per person. A phenomenon with multiple causes.
The map drawn by Le Figaro is puzzling, as the differences between the hospitals (all with more than 300 employees) are significant. Instead of the good student, Colmar. The absenteeism rate is the lowest in France: 3.9%, or 14 days of short or long-term sick leave per year and per person (excluding doctors). At the other end of the ranking, Manosque, with an absenteeism rate bordering on 11%, and nearly 40 days of absence due to illness per year and per agent! Marseille is for its part, the “worst CHU” with 8.2% absenteeism; “every day, 1,100 people are missing, out of a workforce of 12,000 agents”, illustrates Guillaume Guichard.
Is there a north-south gradient in work stoppages due to illness? Not impossible, it is in any case an explanation put forward by the establishment managers interviewed by the journalist. “You are in Corsica here”, or “here, it’s Alsace” he heard in turn during his investigation.
But the geographical location of the establishments is not enough to explain these differences. As proof, the absenteeism rates recorded in Calais, Tourcoing and Roubaix. For the unions, it is rather the working conditions that explain why the agents stop more often in certain establishments. However, it is not those with the highest bed occupancy rates that have the worst absenteeism scores. On the other hand, the data confirms it, the presence of care services for the elderly increases the number of days of sick leave, due to the tasks which are heavier there than in the other services.
Surprising fact: sick leave seems inversely proportional to the RTT days allocated to employees. The lowest absenteeism rates are thus found in establishments where there are fewer RTTs, such as in Colmar, for example, where agents only benefit from 6 days of work time recovery per year. A paradox which could be explained, according to Le Figaroby the fact that the more days you have to ask, the more risk you have of being refused them, and therefore of using sick leave to obtain leave on the desired dates…
For Guillaume Guichard, there is no doubt that the abolition in 2013 of the waiting day instituted in 2012 largely contributes to the phenomenon. According to the journalist, hospitals could have, during the short application of the reform, saved 75 million euros linked to short-term sick leave. The Drees for its part had reached a different conclusion by analyzing the impact of compensation for the day of waiting for employees. It concluded that the rates of sick leave were almost equivalent for employees covered during the waiting period (29.2%) as for employees not covered (28.7%).
