This is Gabriel Attal’s fourth trip since his appointment to Matignon on Tuesday. The Prime Minister promised this Saturday January 13 “32 billion additional euros” for the health system in the “five years to come”. “Among all the problems that we have to resolve throughout the country, all the difficulties, the hospital is obviously at the top of the pile,” affirmed the head of government, after visiting with the new Minister of Labor, Health and Solidarity, Catherine Vautrin, the Dijon university hospital center.
“We will continue to invest massively in the hospital and more broadly in our health system,” he told the press. “The next budget that my government will have to present will be a historic budget for the public hospital,” he added, promising the “continuation of a massive investment for the hospital”.
A “national treasure”
“I say it, our hospital and our caregivers are a national treasure. We are incredibly lucky in France to have a united health system, a public hospital, caregivers who get up every morning with this vocation to “to welcome the French, to care for them and to serve their country,” he said. “We are making up for decades of underinvestment and obviously it takes several years for this to be felt by the caregiver, the doctor who is here, in the hospital,” underlined the Prime Minister.
“We will also continue to transform the financing of our hospital” so that it is “financed in a more intelligent way”, indicated Gabriel Attal. He also mentioned “the issue of coordination with city (medicine), obviously, to also reduce the pressure weighing on the hospital”.
By choosing the emergencies of Dijon University Hospital for her first field trip, Catherine Vautrin emphasized for her part that she “wanted to pay tribute to those who are mobilized to ensure this reception of emergencies at all ages of life”. “What is interesting is a multi-departmental and multi-regional welcome. It is important to highlight these elements of complementarity between urbanity and rurality,” she added.
Gabriel Attal went to a college in Yvelines on Friday with the Minister of Education Amélie Oudéa-Castéra. He also visited a Val-d’Oise police station on Wednesday with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, after traveling to the bedside of flood victims in Pas-de-Calais on Tuesday. Matignon promised one “trip per day”, a way for the young Prime Minister to reconnect with a method inspired by that of the former head of government Jean Castex: going into the field.