“We lasted the summer, but at what cost?”
The situation is still just as tense in the hospitals of Vaucluse. The emergency workers have been on strike since mid-July, and do not intend to stop their movement. A symbolic strike, since they continue to treat patients, but have been facing problematic staff shortages since the beginning of the summer. “We are distributing the workload on the peripheral hospitals but they themselves are in difficulty”, explains the director of emergencies at the Avignon hospital, doctor Ludovic Sauvage. The emergency departments at Cavaillon hospital, for example, had to close several nights in the summer due to lack of staff.
As caregivers feared, summer is exhausting for those who are not on vacation. “We have very tiring days, patients who remain on stretchersdetails Ludovic Sauvage. You have to make phone calls to find them a bed, find solutions to send them home, to other centers or other hospitals, talk to families, doctors… All of that is tiring , and we are not doing our primary job as doctors, which is to see and treat the sick.”
Avignon hospital cannot recruit
“We held on this summer. But at what cost ?asks Doctor Sauvage now. Our staff has suffered, and I wonder if we will not have staff leaving at the start of the school year. I think a lot of people don’t want to relive the summer we’re having.” A concern shared by the director of the Avignon hospital, Pierre Pinzelli, but he can’t recruit. “We have to find candidates, doctors who want to enroll in this life there and there is less appetite. So it is difficult to recruit”.
“The summer was difficult, densealso recognizes Pierre Pinzelli. In July with the Avignon festival and in August because city medicine is less present, because many doctors are on vacation, so we end up with users who have no other solution than to go to the hospital. So yes, the summer is dense, complicated, also because our doctors have to settle down. But thanks to their involvement, there was no difficulty with a major on our territory.”. The director of the Avignon hospital would also like to salute “the very great involvement of those who stayed to ensure that the services continue to operate, both in the medical and in the paramedical fields”.