After the suicide of five nurses, the profession denounces the working conditions and the increased mental burden, in a context of budgetary restrictions.
The nursing profession was on strike on Wednesday. For several years, it has been trying to alert public opinion and the authorities to its working conditions, but this time, the movement is part of a particular context. This summer, five nurses took their own lives, including one at his workplace.
Of course, suicide remains a complex, multifactorial phenomenon which cannot be explained unambiguously. But it doesn’t prevent. We cannot ignore the growing psychosocial risks weighing on the profession.
“They are going to screw each other up”
“These suicides are not a surprise,” comments Nathalie Depoire, president of the National Nursing Coordination who called for a strike. We have been denouncing the growing pressure on teams for months, even years. We must regularly make reports of serious events of imminent danger because we hear from paramedical colleagues who explain that they are no longer able, and who say that they are going to screw up… ”
As a particularly evocative indicator of this discomfort, we can refer to sick leaves, the number of which is exploding in hospital, in particular those linked to a problem of professional exhaustion. The number of sick leaves thus amounts to 24 days on average; in some establishments, it reaches 10% of the staff.
Nathalie Depoire, president of the National Nursing Coordination: ” This dates back to a succession of budgetary restriction reforms. We created a system based on profitability, we no longer talk about humanity in the hospital. We are pawns. “
“No time clocks, no overtime”
In fact, for the members of the nursing staff, the psychological load has continued to increase in recent years. The various reforms aimed at making the hospital an economically productive structure have generated perverse effects. Budgetary austerity, declining staff, financial means at half mast, non-replacement of departures and sick leaves … In the field, the shortcomings of the profitable hospital are painfully felt.
“We have crazy schedules,” confirms Stéphanie Levers, neonatal intensive care nurse at the Montpellier University Hospital. I have colleagues who have more than 300 hours of overtime to ask! We are not looking forward to the near future, because our schedules are not fixed. Impossible to make an appointment with the doctor… This summer, we worked up to 13 hours a day! At home, management realized that we were working too much overtime. So she would consider removing the time clocks – no time clocks, no overtime. We are there ”.
For nurses, the situation is all the more difficult to bear because with patients, they are on the front line. They take care of them on a daily basis, must allay their fears, listen to their suffering… A task intrinsically linked to their profession, which is proving particularly difficult to achieve in a context of staff pressure. “We don’t even have time to reassure them…”, laments Stéphanie Levers.
Stephanie Levers, re-neonatal nurse at the Montpellier University Hospital: “I have a mother whose baby has been hospitalized for eight months. She told me that she will come out of this hospital traumatized. It’s very hard to hear… ”
System D
To share their difficulties, nurses do not have many interlocutors. There are indeed personnel psychologists attached to the Human Resources Department, but from one establishment to another, the situation remains very disparate. “We, if we want to talk, we have to go see the psychologist for parents whose children are taken care of in our service,” explains Stéphanie Levers. And whose psychological problem is not quite comparable …
In this context, an intense feeling of frustration settled among the members of the nursing staff. “This is something that comes up regularly among field surveys: the feeling that they are no longer doing their job well,” explains Frédéric Pierru, a sociologist specializing in the hospital. They have the impression that they are still in System D, that they have to deal with bits of string. The caregivers see the economic logic interfering permanently in the clinical activity, with for example the coding of the patients… It is not only an intensification of the work which weighs on their shoulders ”.
Frédéric Pierru, sociologist specializing in hospital: ” At the time of the reforms, we did not ask enough questions about the missions of the hospital and the means that should be allocated to it. “
Questioned, the government promised measures in the wake of the IGAS report expected in the fall. A report ordered the day after the suicide of Jean-Louis Megnien, professor of cardiology at the Georges-Pompidou hospital, which shows that the discomfort affects all strata in the hospital.
.
