Shortage of doctors: the mayor of Nevers wants to bring professionals from Dijon by plane

Doctors airlifted to a medical wasteland? This is the idea of ​​Denis Thuriot, Mayor of Nevers Denis Thuriot, who wants to find a solution to the lack of nursing staff in the local hospital, where about twenty medical positions are not covered.

The chosen Renaissance came to present its strategy on BFMTV: it wants to open an airline line that connects its city of Nièvre with the regional capital, Dijon, where the CHU on which the Nevers hospital depends is located, and thus encourage health professionals to come back and forth more regularly.

“35 minutes is a game changer”

With this airline, the Dijon-Nevers travel time would be only 35 minutes, compared to 2h30 by train on a regional line and 2h50 by car. Cost for the municipality: 13,000 euros per rotation for an aircraft with capacity for fifteen people.

“Most of the caregivers who could help us tell us ‘I want to go home at night, I want to see my family, I want to see my children’, I listen to it and in 35 minutes the situation changes,” justifies the mayor.

Denis Thuriot compares this price “which remains to be refined” with the cost of employing temporary workers currently at the Nevers hospital post, a total of 3.5 million euros per year.

“I don’t understand this attack on the plane”

Such short-distance (less than 200 km) air travel, however, raises ecological questions, at a time when activists denounce multiple trips by French billionaires on private jets on social media.

“When we need to transport a patient, an organ or blood, we take the plane. Today there is an urgency for the Nivernais to be treated properly ”, replies the councilor.

“I have never seen planes so full at this time,” replies Denis Thuriot. “I don’t quite understand this. plane hitWe are not going to return to the flint era”, considers the mayor of Nevers, who specifies that the objective is not to perpetuate this airline: “It is a temporary option, the idea is that people go to live with us”.

Denis Thuriot also states that his city’s repeated requests for a TGV line connecting it to Dijon have never been taken into account and that there is no high-speed line linking Nevers to Paris.