Madeleine Riffaud lived through a nightmare. This 98-year-old WWII resistance fighter, poet, journalist and historian spent 24 hours in the Lariboisière hospital emergency room on a stretcher unattended.
With our colleagues from the magazine Commonpublishes an open letter to the director of the AP-HP, Nicolás Revel, in which he denounces “the unfortunate state of the health sector.”
It all starts on September 4. The nonagenarian goes to the emergency room of the Parisian hospital “for an important exam due to a long Covid,” she says. Upon her arrival, Madeleine Riffaud is not attended to directly, she is left in a corridor.
“The nurses were running there, overwhelmed. They were handing out ‘I’m coming!’ and works!’. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’, but no one was coming. Never,” she confesses.
“No man’s land”
While the historian is blind, she is carried on a stretcher from here to there, without being informed of her care.
“I stayed there, without any business, without any means of communication with my relatives,” he reprimands.
After twelve hours of waiting, the resistant manages to get a glass of water, but it will be little consolation.
“I spent twenty-four hours on the same stretcher, without eating anything, in no man’s land,” he stresses.
By force of waiting, idle, the nonagenarian is transferred to a private clinic, the day after her admission to the hospital, “without ever having informed my relatives.” Worse still, she claims to be “the third wandering soul that this clinic received that day.”
“The problems are always the same”
From this unfortunate episode, Madeleine Riffaud now wants to take the opportunity to alert the public authorities. She is also well acquainted with the hospital sector since she published a book in 1974 in which she tells the inside story of a cardiovascular surgery department in a Parisian hospital, night sheets. Already at the time he denounced the lack of resources of the nursing staff.
“We had agreed on all points. Everyone agrees, except the governments that follow one another and that, in the best of cases, do not move, ”she recalls.
Almost 50 years later, he points out that “the problems are still the same: lack of qualified personnel, lack of credit, the gap between the state-of-the-art medicine technique and the means that are made available to them is widening.”
For her, the pandemic has only made patient care worse. “They thought I was too old to be worth treating (reflex taken during the covid epidemic?),” she writes.
“My destiny is that of millions of Parisians and French”
But the nonagenarian needs not to “attack the staff (…) who are exhausted. The State has abandoned them all, both the caregivers and the patients.” Also, she doesn’t make her case an exception.
“My misfortune is a daily story in the French hospital. My destiny is that of millions of Parisians and French.”
She claims “not to have emerged unscathed” from this event. “When we enter the infernal circuit, when we are sucked into the ER nothingness, we cannot get out unscathed. Sometimes, we don’t even make it out alive…”, she stresses. Last week, an 81-year-old patient died in the Strasbourg emergency room after waiting more than twenty hours.
The resister concludes her letter by confiding that she wants to be his “voice like Raymond Aubrac – resister during the Second World War – he had asked me to be one of the Resistance – and I will be. I still have a little to force, it is to give it” .
The director of Paris hospitals, Nicolas Revel, has not yet responded to this letter.
Source: BFM TV
