A one-year training course for Samu operators will be effective from September 1st.
One year after the dramatic Naomi Musenga affair, the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn indicated this Friday morning on France Info that a one-year training course for Samu operators will be effective from September 1st.
“I had called the family the day I learned of this tragic event. And then I had received them after working with the emergency doctors and the Samus to find out what action plan we could implement”, recalls the Minister. “Since then, we have implemented all the actions that had been programmed. We are going to create a diploma for medical regulation assistants which will be operational on September 1, 2019. It will be a one-year training course, with more than 1,400 hours courses that are both theoretical and practical,” she says.
A young girl mocked by an SAMU operator
In mid-July last, the public prosecutor of Strasbourg, Yolande Renzi, clarified the circumstances of the death of Naomi Musenga, a 22-year-old girl mocked by an SAMU operator when she called for help, and died a few hours later. “The medical elements obtained explain the death of Naomi Musenga as being the consequence of paracetamol intoxication absorbed by self-medication over several days”, could we read in a press release. “The progressive destruction of his liver cells led to a failure of all his organs, quickly leading to his death”. More specifically, Naomi Musenga died of acute toxic hepatitis, which is the destruction of all the cells in her liver. Since this organ regulates many processes in the human body, it is obvious that complications could have arisen quickly.
Remember that during their telephone conversation, the SAMU operator had been contemptuous, mocking and had hung up too quickly without sending an ambulance to the young girl. Naomi Musenga had to wait five hours to be treated by SOS Médecins, who finally sent her to hospital. She died there on December 29, 2017, victim of a heart attack, due, as we know today, to “paracetamol intoxication”.
“A simplified telephone number”
“In addition, I asked all the Samus in France to harmonize their procedures for handling calls. We will end up with a system that will be the same everywhere”, continues Agnès Buzyn. “We are also working on a simplified telephone number. Naomi Musenga’s case shows that when there is a call passing between a listener and a second listener, there may be a modification of the information. During the the call concerning Mrs. Naomi Musenga, I believe that the fire dispatcher had forwarded the call to the samu dispatcher indicating that Mrs. Musenga had the flu. This could have distorted the perception of gravity. With a unique number, there is no risk of distortion of information or loss of information in the passage of calls between the police, the firefighters and the samu”, details the Minister of Health.
Currently, several emergency numbers coexist: 112 (general, valid in all European countries), 15 (Samu), 17 (police), 18 (fire brigade), 114 (deaf and hard of hearing). Naomi Musenga’s parents called this Friday in The Parisian, to a reorganization of relief by a law bearing his name.
.
