Pediatric emergency services have been saturated since the end of October. This is partly due to an epidemic of bronchiolitis, this viral respiratory infection which mainly affects children under two years old. But the real reason is the deep crisis of the health system. The Minister of Health, François Braun, announced on November 2 an envelope “ around 400 million euros » aid for services under pressure. But this measure is far from sufficient, according to the Collective Pediatrics.
(Rebroadcast November 17, 2022)
In front of pediatric emergencies, a young mother with her feverish and tired little girl. They have been waiting for seven hours, and the child is still not taken care of. ” We have to wait, it’s as simple as that. There is one doctor for more than forty people in a waiting room “, she notes. ” Then, we are told just as clearly, there is not enough room. There, I was sent to a pediatric ward to switch back to a general practitioner because the waiting room had to be relieved.. »
This father comes out of the emergency room in a hurry, his baby has been treated, but after long hours of waiting. ” We stayed with him for almost nine hours in the waiting room, which is unacceptable for me. “, he laments.
No longer able to treat with dignity
Both determined and worried, Caroline is a nurse in the pediatric emergency department of a large hospital in the Paris region. It is formal: a little patient can no longer be cared for with dignity.
” We are supposed to manage the emergency with a vital risk in the more or less short term for the child who is brought to us “, explains Caroline. ” We’re all so overwhelmed with children [qui ont des cas] more or less serious than this child who would have been seen quickly in a normal context, with sufficient staff, with enough space to see all the children, with enough doctors to see them, he will find himself waiting 5 to 6 hours sitting on the floor in the middle of a hallway. We are there “, she lets go
► Also to listen: Pediatrics crisis: saturated hospital services
The nurse dares to say it, for lack of resources, choices have to be made: ” It’s choosing between two one-month-old children who have bronchiolitis, who of the two will be entitled to a scope that will allow us to monitor its constants continuously, which one will get oxygen first… “says the nurse.
The cry of pediatrics
Since the start of the epidemic, in Île-de-France, for lack of hospital beds, around forty infants in respiratory distress have been transferred to provincial hospitals.
Véronique Hentgen is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Versailles hospital. She explains that there is the fate of little patients with bronchiolitis, but not only. ” The sick ones “others”, the chronically ill, diabetes in children, treatment for sickle cell disease in children… We can no longer hospitalize them except in life-threatening emergencies. So we have to sort out – I know the government doesn’t like that term, but it’s still the one we use – our patients to find out who is most urgent and who needs a hospital bed the most, to decide who we’re going to put in that bed. »
The pediatrician issues a cry of alarm: The public hospital will turn into a hospice if we don’t carry out an immediate structural reform. Not in three months, now. »
Pediatric professionals feel completely abandoned.