REPORTING. At Toulouse University Hospital, despite exhaustion, caregivers cling
A year and a half after the arrival of Covid-19, this virus is now integrated as a disease in its own right in many hospital departments. This is the case in the intensive care of the pneumology department of the Larrey hospital in Toulouse. Reporting.
It is around 10 a.m. this Thursday in December, in the pulmonology intensive care unit of the Larrey hospital of the Toulouse University Hospital, health professionals are busy. As every morning, the same mechanism operates: the day shift takes over from the night shift and takes stock of the priorities.
The phone of Elise Noël-Salvina, hospital practitioner and head of the intensive care unit, rings. “This is the sixth call of the morning to ask us to pick up a new patient. In winter, the 12 beds of the department are occupied without interruption because many fragile people decompensate, and with the Covid, it becomes even sportier “She explains. With the other part of the service, Pauline Peres, they take stock of possible upcoming releases.
A perpetual gymnastics to ensure the good follow-up of the patients and the fluidity of the aisles and places, in particular since the appearance of the Covid-19 which has now become a “disease in its own right” for this service.
Between the two corridors leading to the bedrooms, a room overlooking the hospital grounds has a series of surveillance screens. Véronika Robert, nursing assistant for two years in the service, is busy. The Covid-19 did not disgust her with her job, far from it, her integration project is an intensive care unit. “I love the moments speed and intense, the fact of being in intensive care here confirmed my desire to work in sheaves, ”notes the 30-something.
“Not a big pick of positive”
When asked if anything positive came out of this period, the caregiver’s blue eyes, the same color as her mask, are lost in space. She thinks … but “doesn’t find much positive”. What comes to him instead is the deterioration of the relationship with some patients when, at the time of the 5th wave, most of the people infected with Covid-19 have not been vaccinated. “The care sometimes becomes very complicated in the face of people who can be conspirators and blame us, our caregivers, for having made them sick …”
And then there is also exhaustion. Beside her, Olivier Blanc, nurse for ten years in the service, says that many professionals are fed up, “the nursing profession is not a profession in which one stays for long”. The working conditions “wear out, many of us are separated or divorced,” he notes. Behind his mask, the forty-something smiles, he “loves this job”: “And to continue to hold, I make sure to cut completely on my free time”.
Cut to relieve oneself, to relieve the pressure, the degraded working conditions, the insufficient upgrades in his eyes. “It’s a whole philosophy that must be reviewed: how to work to a better organization, without wearing people down to the rope?” Questions that the executives of the team also find. Élise Noël-Salvina insists on the attractiveness of the hospital: “We must make people want to stay, to get involved …” Especially young people, underlines Pauline Peres, whose “the ideal is no longer in adequacy with the difficult requirements of the nursing profession “.
For the head of the pneumology department, Prof. Jérôme Mazères, “micro-attacks accumulate in daily life (management, stress, relationship with the patient, etc.). We expect a lot from government measures. I am optimistic, but vigilant because the balance is fragile, we can and we must improve things “, he concludes.