90 per cent of healthcare staff reported sick in a town in the Ile-de-France region around Paris in a bid to draw attention to deteriorating working conditions. In another town, 55 of the 59 caregivers at the emergency department of a regional hospital centre have been on sick leave for days.

With fatigue and hopelessness overwhelming people working in the French health care system, the staff of the emergency department in Pontoise, a town in the Paris region, decided to make an extraordinary move: they called in sick. 90 per cent of the workers in the department in question went on sick leave, the movement “UrgencesEnArretMaladie” (emergency workers on sick leave) announced in post on Twitter.

URGENT-90% de l’effectif soignant des Urgences Adultes de l’Hôpital de Pontoise est en arrêt maladie depuis ce matin, une grande première en IDF!! Les agents se retrouvent dès 9h á la Direction.#epuisement #soignants #HopitalEnDanger .Les médias sont sur place.@HopitalNovo95

— UrgencesEnArrêtMaladie (@lesurgencolere) January 9, 2023

The tweet also reveals that the workers’ representatives discussed the situation with the hospital’s management. The hospital leaders have not commented yet, but a nurse participating in the protest disclosed that the management had been informed about the action in the early morning hours, Le Figaro reports.

As reported by the newspaper, the employees on sick leave are demanding an increase in staff numbers and called on the management to urgently activate the so-called “white plan” to free up as many hospital beds as possible, since a tridemic is raging with the coronavirus, flu virus, and the RSV virus causing upper respiratory tract symptoms concurrently. The “white plan” for French hospitals includes organisational measures aimed at managing a health emergency situation or intensive hospital activity. According to the workers, This move is urgently needed because patients are regularly forced to wait for hospital treatment on stretchers in the corridor, because there aren’t enough beds in the emergency department, workers say. Amidst the horrible conditions prevailing in the hospital, patients sometimes have to wait for more than twenty hours in the emergency department before a doctor sees them, said a nurse, who requested anonymity for fear of the employer’s retaliation.

Several other employees, however, were willing to give their names to AFP’s journalists. A young nurse said that she had to tend to 40 patients alone and it was impossible to pay proper attention to all of them. The woman fears that one day she will be dragged to court for the death of one of her patients. In that event, she would be held solely responsible, the hospital’s leadership would surely not accompany her to the court hearing, she said.

Eric Boucharel, the secretary of the UNSA health care union said that there are patients who spend up to one and a half days on a stretcher before they are examined by an emergency ward practitioner. The secretary also said that many health care employees are anxious to go to work because they are afraid that a patient lying on a stretcher will die while they are busy attending to another one.

Alexandre Aubert, the hospital’s director, also spoke to the press. He said that handling the post-pandemic situation proved to be difficult, because the global crisis of health care had led many employees to look for another job. He added that there are only long-term solutions to the situation, but there are employees who want quick answers. He also voiced his astonishment that some 50 nurses went on sick leave overnight, without any prior notice.

💬 “Le post-pandémique devient très difficile á gérer”

Alexandre Aubert, le directeur de l’hôpital de Pontoise, s’exprime après les nombreux arrêts maladie du personnel pic.twitter.com/2IqUOJPygF

— BFM Paris Île-de-France (@BFMParis) January 9, 2023

The hospital near Paris, however, is not the only health care institution whose employees intend to call attention to the problems by taking sick leave. In Thionville, north-east France, 55 of the 59 nurses in the emergency ward of the regional hospital centre have been on sick leave since the end of December citing physical and mental exhaustion. Currently, the hospital can only treat patients in life-threatening condition and children, all other patients are referred to other institutions.

Le Parisien’s reporter then went to a nearby town, Metz, where, much to his surprise, he found a tent set up on the hospital grounds. He said that the tent was erected for the treatment of patients who were referred from Thionville, but could not be treated in the hospital’s emergency department due to lack of capacity.