“Medical staff leave the hospital because they don’t want to become monsters”

Lhe National Council for Refoundation (CNR), of which one of the major subjects of reflection is health, opens in a context of deep hospital crisis. We are witnessing a haemorrhage of personnel, emergency services have had to be reduced or closed… The pandemic has aggravated an already very deteriorated situation.

In any debate on health, what must first be clarified are the reasons for this crisis. Those who leave the public hospital or wish to do so in the short term do not, for the most part, want to change jobs. If they reorient themselves rather towards the liberal, the private sector, even education, it is because the hospital crisis is above all moral. It stems from an ethical suffering linked to what caring means.

Care cannot be Taylorized and yet it tends to do so. You can’t cure people just by changing their bolts. Of course, France prides itself on the high level of technicality of its doctors and surgeons and we would not want to see them flee to foreign countries or the private sectors. But excelling in cutting-edge areas is not enough. Patients have to deal with medical secretaries, stretcher-bearers, nursing assistants, cleaners, nurses, radiology technicians… Each profession has its own skills, which are not the same, but all of these people provide care.

Discreet work

Their mission is to humanize the hospital. Reception, attention, anticipation of needs (to rest, to be reassured…), these essential dimensions of care do not cover those of scientific medicine or what is assessed in terms of quantified acts. This is the invaluable part of care, in the sense that it cannot be measured with the tools of management, but remains what counts most in the experience of illness or hospitalization.

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This work, often discreet, even invisiblehas undergone an unprecedented conceptual development thanks to research on the care, an English word that designates the non-curative dimensions of care and takes as its perspective the vulnerability and interdependence of everyone. But, above all, this field of study is interested in those who take care of others, thus overcoming the social devaluation that affects feminized activities, of low visibility, in direct relation to the taboos of the body and death; activities which many still believe would not require any particular skills and would depend above all on a more or less warm temperament.

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