“no dramas” this summer in the emergency room, but the concern persists

Summer isn’t over yet but diagnosis time is already essential in the world of health: the emergency services, which are on the front line in the face of the hospital crisis, forced for some to close for lack of sufficient personnel, have they withstood the shock of a summer period under high tension? The Ministry of Health, which promised a detailed report at the end of September, is already moving forward. “The announced disaster did not occur, thanks to the strong investment of professionals in the field”said François Braun at the Doctor’s Daily, August 29.

Before the summer, fears and warnings had never been so strong about the risk of tragedies. “Emergency room overcrowding is a factor associated with undue excess mortality,” alerted in our columns Frédéric Adnet, head of emergencies at the Avicenne hospital, in Bobigny, on 1^er June. One hundred and twenty emergency services had to operate in a degraded manner, going as far as closure, from the end of May, according to the SAMU-Urgences de France union.

Read the column: Article reserved for our subscribers “In the emergency room, one in five departments is in danger of closing this summer. So there will be deaths.”

“There is no question of declaring victory, we remain very vigilant, the summer is not over, we argue at the Ministry of Health. But the collapse that we were predicted to have, fortunately, did not take place, and the measures that we deployed this summer will be able to serve as a fulcrum for the next stage. » The “toolbox” of 41 measures deployed urgently, in July, must be evaluated at the end of September, before its possible sustainability.

Two reports were commissioned from the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs, one on all the measures, the other specifically on the one that crystallized the attention: the filtering at the entrance to the emergency room, imposing a call to the 15 before having access – or not – to the service. This regulation deployed in approximately 20% of the 660 emergency departments, mostly at night, has been denounced by part of the medical community as a “sorting” at the entrance and a questioning of the public service.

The SAMU still under tension

What are the doctors saying today? Union positions expressed before the summer have changed little. “I do not understand that a minister can take flight with an extrapolation of the truth”, tackle Patrick Pelloux, president of the Association of Emergency Physicians of France, still believing that this regulation is not “conclusive”. “If there were no deaths in the emergency room, it is because the professionals were there, and the complaints filed, if any, will take time to be investigated. » It reports a dozen alerts received by mail for poor care. For the emergency physician, the ” disaster “ keep on going ” silently “citing the example of the closing this summer of the SMUR in Lariboisière, in Paris, “for the first time in its existence”.

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