At the call of FO, a national day of action to alert on the catastrophic situation of the public hospital was organized this Tuesday, June 20. In Aude, trade unionists denounce deteriorating working conditions.
“The situation? It’s always getting worse and worse!” For Yannick Bonnafous, from the FO Santé Aude department group, the observation is clear. With his Aude colleagues from FO, he drew up an inventory “catastrophic”. “There is a desire to kill the public hospital. Health is in a terrible state”gets carried away Bruno Izard of the CH of Carcassonne. “The conditions are constantly deteriorating. The situation is alarming and more particularly as the summer period approaches.”
And they point fingers “the lack of downstream beds” which in the end clutters the emergency room, “healthcare access services that have not solved the problems of lack of doctors”. Marcela Cancian (Ehpad in Espéraza), Jean-Pascal Ferrer and Dominique Lorenzo (CH Narbonne) speak “from a general exhaustion of the hospital staff”. So much so that the profession no longer attracts. Resignations follow one another like sick leaves. “We lack trained staff and it is difficult to recruit. We have entered a vicious circle. With ever more patients to be cared for for the caregivers present. We are degrading the profession”, explains Yannick Bonnafous. FO waits “investments by the State to meet the needs of the populations”.
“A system that compresses”
And to ask “standards as in all administrations”. “How many caregivers are needed per patient? We want caregiver-patient ratios to be established”, proposes Yannick Bonnafous. For trade unionists, this situation is the result “choices made for decades by successive governments to want to manage the hospital in the same way as a mercantile company”. “We are in a system that compresses, which compresses for lack of personnel”, continues Bruno Izard. And all together they point out “the mistreatment of officers who are ill or officers who have restrictions due to health problems”. “Establishments do not respect the texts to set up the return to work. They even say: stay sick. No one pays attention to us. We are being finished off”they are indignant.
Yannick Bonnafous took advantage of this press conference to worry about the fate of the Ehpad project in Ste-Eulalie, which is to replace the old retirement home, which had been flooded by the Fresquel flood in October 2018. But the new project is slow to see the light of day. “We are still waiting for the cost to double. There is a risk that the nursing home will disappear. 52 resident beds and 50 agent positions are at stake.”