“Psychiatry on sale, everything will disappear!” It is in particular what one could read on the placards of the fifty psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses who have the Tuesday morning in front of Purpan in Toulouse. They also blocked the traffic of the tram at the end of the morning. They had already had in front of the ARS in Toulouse on June 28.

The idea of ​​this call for national strike is of requesting better working conditions while a meeting takes place Tuesday morning at the Ministry of Health in Paris. The unions’ findings are alarming: caregivers are forced to “sort patients” because they lack staff, hospital beds with fermenting places.

Very complicated access to care

In the demonstration, Nicolas Navarro. He is a psychiatrist – addictologist at the University Hospital of Toulouse on the Lagrave site and a member of the collective of public psychiatrists of Haute-Garonne. “Concretely, if a person is in difficulty, it is very complicated to have access to a consultation center because the caregivers are saturated, cannot ensure follow-up. They sort, requests that are made. And there, we are talking about sorting and not prioritization because there is no alternative solution.

“The other very concrete things, according to Nicolas Navarro, it is the lack of hospitalization places that makes us differ for several days, several weeks from the possibilities of hospitalization of patients who wait days and days on stretchers, in consultation offices in the emergency room, before going to have the possibility of entering hospitalization. People who abandon care because the reception conditions are very degraded.

Other actions if nothing moves

A delegation was received on Tuesday by the office of the Minister of Health in Paris. Health Minister François Braun is due to meet representatives of the sector in the coming weeks. In Toulouse, if nothing moves, caregivers plan to move up a gear with an indefinite strike or collective resignation.

According to the inter-union, this “abandonment of public psychiatry today affects five out of six hospitals” in France. You should know that one out of two people in France will need care for themselves or their entourage for a psychological difficulty.