“Your silence is deafening.” More than a month after a first open letter sent to Emmanuel Macron, in which health professionals criticized the government’s political inaction in the face of the saturation of pediatric hospital services, partly caused by the numerous cases of bronchiolitis, 10,000 caregivers sent this Wednesday a new, much more scathing letter to the President of the Republic.
tense situation and guilt
Posted in the newspaper The worldthe document signed by various luminaries, including Professor Robert Cohen, President of the National Professional Council of Pediatrics or Professor Rémi Salomon, President of the AP-HP Establishment Medical Commission, begins with a detailed description of the daily life of pediatric services .
The signatories thus qualify “children hospitalized on stretchers or on their parents’ knees in the emergency room” or “intubated and hospitalized without a room in the intensive care corridor”, as well as “late care and precarious care” and “premature return home” . and disaster returns of children sent home for lack of space.
Worse yet, caregivers also denounce their guilt “for sending adolescents to adult services.” “Now we are sending 3-year-old children,” they point out again.
According to them, the transfer of patients between hospitals in different regions is a serious degradation of care, especially since “the epidemic has spread everywhere, saturating all French pediatric services.” On November 9, the Minister of Health, François Braun, had launched the ORSAN plan at the national level to face this bronchiolitis epidemic.
Quickly answers
Once the diagnosis has been made, the caregivers say they refuse to be the “eternal adjustment variable” of the hospital and they reproach Emmanuel Macron for not having “appeared to reassure the parents” or “assuring the caregivers of his support.”
“Instead, your government is accumulating envelopes and temporary emergency measures,” they denounce.
At the beginning of November, François Braun had announced new envelopes “of the order of 400 million euros” to deal with the problems of the hospital sector, whose reception had been quite uneven among health professionals, who believe that the problem is not pecuniary .
In this letter, the signatories still list their grievances. They demand that Emmanuel Macron be “by their side” and that they recognize “the responsibility of the State in the great health crisis that we are experiencing.” According to them, the Head of State must commit to “taking the necessary measures to ensure the work of caregivers in the hospital”, including “recognition of the specificity and experience of pediatrics”.
A commitment is also required to “put the hospital service back at the center of decisions” and “increase the number of young people trained in the caring professions and provide general education in paediatrics for all”.
According to this open letter, time is running out and health professionals hope that these proposals will be discussed “more specifically during the Assises de la pédiatrie, in the spring of 2023.” “A society that can no longer take care of children is a society in decline”, the signatories still warn, who, to conclude, question: “Back to the wall, will France be able to save its children?”
Pediatricians expect the bronchiolitis outbreak to peak later this week.
Source: BFM TV
