Already in December 2019, heads of departments at the Toulouse CHU children’s hospital had symbolically resigned from their administrative function to warn about the situation of a structure that was running out of steam and about the existing professional risk. In January 2021, the nurses in the operating room were on strike to denounce the non-replacement of a dozen nurses.
The children’s hospital has between 700 and 800 people, tomorrow Tuesday January 11 the call for an indefinite strike in pediatrics launched by the CGT could be very followed. Nurses, childcare assistants, doctors, stretcher bearers, administrative staff … will gather in front of the Children’s Hospital at 1 p.m., after a minute of silence they will join in Saint-Cyprien the procession of demonstrators from the health and action sector social. A national mobilization at the call of the CGT where the staff demand real improvements in their salary and working conditions.
“Degraded working conditions”
At the Toulouse CHU Children’s Hospital the situation has deteriorated. In any case, this is what Pauline Salingue, specialist educator and secretary of the Health, Safety and Working Conditions Committee (CHSCT) of Purpan Hospital at the CGT, says:
The situation is catastrophic, the working conditions are degraded. We are understaffed and that is the heart of the matter.
“There is a structural shortage of personnel because the hospital is understaffed even when there is no sick leave and insufficient recruitment on the part of the management in relation to the winter epidemics”, explains Pauline. Sanguine.
“We had warned the CHSCT in October that the planned recruitments were not going to be sufficient and unfortunately we find ourselves with colleagues on the knees with patients who have to wait in the emergency room.
“Endangering colleagues and patients”
At the end of December, according to the CGT, there was, according to the CGT, a 2h30 wait on weekends if only to be seen by the guidance nurse in the children’s emergency room, the finding is not exaggerated. Pauline.
Today there is a real danger to both our colleagues and patients with a lack of space and staff. Waiting patients and exhausted colleagues with significant occupational risk.
Lack of anticipation from management who “do not take responsibility”
“At the Toulouse University Hospital, we are missing 1,500 positions since 2014, it is 300 positions that were eliminated in 2020 in overtime, the equivalent of 250 full-time work and then in all the departments of vacant positions that are not busy and no replacement capacity, you have a colleague on sick leave and at the CHU we practice self-replacement, going back on your rest your leave “, denounces the trade unionist.
The situation is particularly exacerbated at the children’s hospital, in particular because of the winter epidemic and the total lack of anticipation of the management according to the CGT, “while it has been years that we have been saying that we must recruit because the agents cannot ask their three weeks of leave the summer because every winter it cracks we were refused recruitments and now we are told we can not recruit “, annoys Pauline.
“This policy of destroying the hospital is national, but the management perfectly applies the national directives for the elimination of bed posts with a pathogenic management policy towards the agents of the children’s hospital who are struggling to do their job well. the management made all the agents who were at 80% she gives them to 100%! “
Many staff are resigning or moving into the private sector, if nothing is done in terms of hiring and salary increases, in a few months according to the CGT, the hospital in general will “explode”.
For its part, the management of the CHU does not deny its difficulties in recruiting staff but “cannot let it be said in particular on social networks that the management is not doing anything about this situation”, explains Edouard Douheret, Director of Human Resources of the CHU of Toulouse.
The director of the Children’s division, Sarah Viguier, wishes to “salute the executives and teams mobilized despite the staffing problems faced with the reality of recruitment difficulties in a context of severe epidemic crisis that the children’s hospital had to face and from September. We are now doing everything we can to strengthen the pole so that the yearsto come are easier to live with “.
“To Unprecedented Crisis, management is trying to provide an unprecedented and anticipated response.”
“Unlike the Christmas phase, we are seeing a decrease in pediatric emergencies because we are below 200 passages per day, also on bronchiolitis we are on less than 40 patients observed”, explains Christophe Razin, secretary general of the Toulouse University Hospital. The hospital had to deal with a particularly formidable crisis at the beginning of December and complex to manage with a mixture of bronchiolitis, gastric diseases and various respiratory viruses leading to very dense activity in the emergency room.
“A crisis that is all the more complex to manage because of problems in recruiting nurses on the labor market,” said Christophe Mazin, secretary general of the Toulouse University Hospital.
“To face this unprecedented crisis, the CHU set up from the start an early pediatric epidemic plan with medical and paramedical teams to agree on a reception capacity, therefore additional beds and additional recruitments. , an unprecedented response was proposed and which came up against the meaning of implementation. A complicated implementation with recruitment difficulties and at the same time we were faced with absenteeism linked to the covid epidemic “.
To face this winter crisis, the 40 additional beds could not be armed, this level reached 20 beds in mid-December with 16 additional beds at Christmas which has enabled us to hold out until today with a decline that is starting. “
From now on, deprogramming is done on a case-by-case basis, it is less systematic and the outpatient switch is favored.
Christophe Razin specifies “we are aware that with regard to human resources we are having difficulties, we hear the feelings of caregivers, we are listening to them, to this unprecedented crisis we are trying to provide an unprecedented and anticipated response”.
Recruitment policy and anticipation
In terms of jobs for this epidemic plan and for the children’s division, the management collected more than 118 applications during the year and recruited 72 people, “I’m talking about all caregiver profiles and in these recruitments more than 2 / 3 are dedicated to the winter plan, that is to say the effort devoted since September to this epidemic plan “, explains Edouard Douheret, Director of Human Resources at Toulouse University Hospital.
“We are recruiting in a particular epidemic context. Most of the people recruited, in particular nurses, will remain at the CHU, because since this summer we have been recruiting our nurses directly on permanent contracts”.
New modalities, “we are giving these agents prospects, after 8 months we offer them to become civil servants, it is 8 months today it will be 6 months tomorrow”.
At the Children division, Sarah Viguier explains the new efforts in terms of staff recruitment. “Anticipate more and train professionals more upstream to take better charge of seasonal periods, but beyond that there are the problems of daily absenteeism. We therefore need to put in the necessary replacement resources. We have carried out real analyzes. in this sense in the first half of 2021 to increase the size of our substitute team. Work on the working hours of this team, work on the skills of professionals. So much adaptation that we are trying to implement to improve the well-being of our agents all year round and not just during the seasonal period “.
“The management of the epidemic leads us to rethink our organization both on HR and on medical organizations and all this fits more broadly into the whole strategy of the large regional children’s hospital for which we have obtained over 5 years major funding of 147 million confirmed by the ARS. At the same time, we were able to obtain additional resources, a budget of 300,000 euros for equipment dedicated to the children’s center, “adds Christophe Razin.
12% of the staff of the children’s center, the equivalent of 99 agents declared themselves to be strikers according to the management.
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