The Minister of Health, Stéphanie Rist, announced this Monday, November 3, on BFMTV that due to the lack of doctors at the Caen University Hospital, the Health Reserve will be deployed. The National Intersyndicalist of Inmates (Isni) announced on Sunday that the emergency rooms of the Caen university hospital will no longer be able to accommodate inmates starting Monday due to a lack of doctors to supervise them.
“I mobilized the Health Reserve so that reinforcement doctors could arrive,” Stéphanie Rist told BFMTV. “This is not about leaving students in safe conditions that would not be appropriate,” he added.
The Health Reserve is a system of volunteer health professionals who can be mobilized by the State in a very short period of time for exceptional situations, according to Public Health France.
“This emergency service will operate for the next six months, without students, without interns, but it will be able to accommodate patients,” says the minister.
“Unsatisfactory” conditions
The president of the Isni, Mélanie Debarreix, pointed out on Sunday that “there were not enough experienced doctors to allow satisfactory follow-up of the inmates” in the emergency room of the Caen university hospital.
The supervision conditions of the inmates “were not satisfactory, there were referrals and some were emotionally overloaded.” “There should have been six doctors in the department, but there were only three. This had an impact on the health of the inmates,” Mélanie Debarreix explained to AFP.
“It is a very rare situation, but the most important thing is that all this is done without impact on their training,” continued Mélanie Debarreix, lamenting that “interns are the adaptation variables and an easy workforce.”
Given this situation, the collective decision was made to transfer 20 emergency room inmates to other departments of the University Hospital. “We were lucky in Caen, because the Regional Health Agency, the dean of the medical school and the university hospital were really with us. It was a decision that was made with the university hospital and not against it,” says Mélanie Debarreix.
A “triple challenge”
Contacted by BFMTV, the management of the Caen university hospital believes that the inmates were “right” to express “their discomfort.” He assures that the decision not to accept interns is due to “a shared observation” with the dean of UFR Santé.
“A new educational project is already in preparation, under the direction of the university director of the service. The objective is to reopen the practices in 2026, in better conditions, with reinforced supervision and a quality of training that meets expectations,” indicates the CHU management.
However, these deficiencies are not exclusive to the Caen institution, lamented Mélanie Debarreix. “The same thing happens everywhere in France: interns are afraid to speak behind the scenes, for fear of repercussions,” he said, recalling the “alert” role of the ISNI. In Caen, “we were lucky to have the support of the ARS and the CHU to respond to this emergency. It was better to make this decision than to have the exhaustion of the inmates behind us.”
Source: BFM TV
