Due to the lack of sufficient nursing personnel, “a further reduction in the number of maternity wards” is necessary, according to a report presented to the Academy of Medicine that considers it “illusory to support” those who perform fewer than 1,000 deliveries per year.
Lack of attractiveness, open positions, use of temporary workers: Like the rest of the hospital, maternity wards are not immune to staff shortages. This “unprecedented demographic crisis” already explains the continued decline in the number of maternity wards, which dropped to 471 at the end of 2021, this report notes.
The Academy of Medicine has not yet voted in plenary session on this document prepared under the direction of gynecologist Yves Ville, head of the obstetrics department at the Necker hospital in Paris. But his findings, first disclosed in the parisianquick cut.
“Regroup” maternity hospitals
Its authors consider that “an adequate perinatal policy should be based on a greater reduction in the number of maternity cases” and consider “illusory to sustain an activity of less than 1,000 deliveries” per year when “more than 80%” of the services below this threshold “they are in serious demographic stress.”
Its “regrouping” with the large neighboring maternity hospitals “would eliminate 111 establishments” out of the 452 sites in mainland France, the twenty structures abroad would have to “be the subject of a particular examination”.
This reorganization would slightly deteriorate access to care: the proportion of pregnancies that reside less than half an hour from the nearest maternity hospital would drop by almost five points, to 89%.
However, the effect would be concentrated in mountainous areas, “difficult to access and with low population density”, while large cities such as Paris, Marseille, Lille, Nantes and their surroundings would be spared.
But “only the large structures will be able to offer a supply and a quality of care demanded by both users and professionals”, affirms the report that calls for “strengthening the human resources” of these services so that they stop being “caricatured as ‘baby factories’ “.
Source: BFM TV
