In Valognes, in the Manche department, the summer was hot. On numerous occasions, residents and local elected officials have mobilized to protest against the closure of the emergency department. It was out of the question for them to go to the Cherbourg hospital center located 40 minutes away.
However, this decision owes nothing to chance. This service, which should have operated with 25 doctors, had only fifteen, an insufficient number to ensure the continuity of care, 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
And the case of Valognes is far from isolated. One in ten emergency services would be threatened, according to calculations made by Le Figaro. In total, 67 small structures have insufficient activity: between 8,000 and 10,000 visits per year, or 1.1 patients per hour.
Behind this battle, it is the very survival of these local hospitals that is at stake. They are generally located in “a large town, lost in the countryside between two prefectures”, explains the daily. In this “France of the periphery”, these establishments have lost their surgery and maternity services. And emergencies are most often used as the gateway to the hospital. To condemn them would amount to asphyxiating the hospital itself.
An embarrassment for the inhabitants, a disaster for local elected officials, demonstrations everywhere in France for the government.
Precisely to avoid contagion and new outbreaks, Marisol Touraine promised that Valognes would find its emergency service in September.
But for how much longer? In a report that he has just submitted to the Minister of Health, the daily tells us, Dr Jean-Yves Grall, director of the regional health agency (ARS) of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, estimates that we must “avoid the unnecessary presence of doctors [urgentistes] during periods of low activity or on structures with low overall activity”.
According to this specialist, they could be transformed into centers “for medical consultations without emergency doctors and without appointments”. Clearly, 67 emergency services would be threatened with closure.
