“Disgusted by the system”, these caregivers who leave the hospital in the middle of the second wave

It’s just the last straw, but it’s not the underlying reason. In early November, in the midst of the second wave of the Covid-19 epidemic, Thomas Laurent left the hospital. This Lyon nurse from Hospices Civils de Lyon, graduated since 2010, made the decision during the summer, at the end of the first wave, lived at the Edouard-Herriot hospital.

It’s over, the 35-year-old embarks on a new path: he will be a bookseller, with a training he should enroll in in January. She hopes to take some more holidays as a nurse by then. If the caregiver raises the sails – placing himself on availability – it is because “Support of the most” work in understaffed situations.

“It is not in itself Covid, He explains, is the lack of response behind it: we told ourselves that the Covid crisis had raised the issues that we had been raising to the sky for years, but there we no longer have any hope of immediate improvement, we do not want to die at work, it is not worth it. “ In recent months she has worked in post-emergency, then in geriatrics. “This summer, every other day, we were short-staffed, it was a doctor who was missing that and that day, a nursing assistant, a nurse … We see that we can not work properly, we just limit the break. “

According to some indicators, this “flight” of health workers from the public hospital appears to be limited: a survey by the French Hospital Federation (FHF), conducted among 300 facilities at the end of September and made public on 10 November, identified about 12,200 terminations (resignation, retirees, termination of contract) of nurses and nursing assistants, or a “Slight rise” he valued. These departures are however, to listen to union representatives or certain doctors, a phenomenon that continues, indeed worsens.

It is the first “Post-Ségur disappointment” as Thomas Laurent recounts, this € 8 billion hospital plan announced after the health crisis in July, by the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran. “We realized he didn’t really intend to put people back in the hospital. “ The caregiver is more convinced than ever, in view of the 2021 budget, that “He still talks about a return to balance and savings”, He said. However, the nurse intends to remain mobilized in the collective he belongs to, the Interhospital Collective, passing on the “user” side: “I, I am ecœurea, but without the public hospital there is no future. “

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