In an open letter to Agnès Buzyn, a nurse describes the daily difficulties encountered and announces to hang up her blouse.
“This morning, I broke down. “In an open letter to the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn, a young nurse at the Cheylard hospital center, in Ardèche, explains why she decided to hang up her gown after only a year and a half of exercise. His open letter, posted December 27 on Facebook, has been shared nearly 18,000 times. It testifies to a situation of extreme tension in the public.
A critical lack of staff
The main reason is the staff shortage. “A nurse may find herself managing 35 patients alone under increased clinical surveillance, welcoming one or more user (s) who enter” programmed “and taking charge of one or two vital emergency (s), all simultaneously, ”explains Mathilde Basset, 24 years old. Assigned to the nursing home of the hospital, she describes the same mismanagement, with three full-time nurses for 99 residents and no night nurse.
And the young nurse concludes with one of the darkest findings. “I love the care, the care, the relationship of trust with my patients, but I do not work in a medicalized place of life. I am in a slaughterhouse that crushes humanity from the lives it shelters, in pajamas or white coats. “
Worried Ehpads
The “hospital malaise”, to use the term now established, is well known to all health stakeholders. Torn between an ethics of care and the imperatives of profitability (drastic reduction in staff, multiplication of tasks), many health professionals are no longer able to give meaning to their mission. And if the public hospital is often on the front line of mobilizations, public nursing homes are also increasingly concerned.
If austerity at the hospital is not new, and is based on a series of deep reforms implemented in the 2000s, the public medico-social is in the middle of the ford. The reform of the financing of nursing homes, intended to align public and private prices, worries many. The French hospital federation (FHF) warned about this last summer, estimating the shortfall for some public retirement homes at 200 million euros, welcoming in particular the most dependent groups.
Social movement at the end of the month
Questioned, the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn did not respond to the open letter. “I am attentive to the discomfort of the public hospital. I lived it, I know it well ”, she recalled last October. on the set of the Health Magazine, before specifying: “I’m not going to work miracles, I prefer to say it. One way of indicating that if the method is intended to be soft, the budgetary trajectory is much less so.
The reform of the financing of nursing homes, decided under the previous five-year term, was confirmed by the Minister, and will be accompanied by a budget of 100 million euros intended to strengthen the staffing rates. Not sure that the measure is enough to convince: the unions have already called for a national strike day in nursing homes on January 30.
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