Friday April 10, the emergency room at Béziers hospital broke down. The influx, without plausible explanation, of patients saturated the structure and the wait was enormous. More than 220 people had attended the service every day the previous week. What about now?
What happened this Friday April 10? The emergency department at Béziers hospital was saturated by a massive influx of patients. At 10 p.m., there were 60 waiting to be picked up. “That day, explains Carole Gleyzes, from the hospital management, our service counted 86 entries in four hours. This represents 40% of our daily activity. This exploded at 6:30 p.m., while two of our doctors were on the ground responding to the Smur. In fact, they were no longer present on site to take care of patients arriving in the emergency room.”
Even stranger, this stampede, which began the previous week, continued throughout the week that followed. While the service should not exceed 176 patients per day, “cgrew to 207 people. All this week, we welcomed a lot of people and we had to get closer to center 15 and the regulations to limit access. Even today, the situation is still very delicate.”
Saint-Privat also overwhelmed
The massive arrival of patients, at the same time, is the cause of this overload of the service. And the situation has had repercussions on neighboring establishments: “The Saint-Privat clinic welcomes all emergencies relating to the specialties it covers, explains Nicolas Daudé, the director of the Boujan establishment, which also has an emergency service. But on Friday April 10, at 8:30 p.m., our emergency doctor, contacted by the Samu, was only able to offer the urology beds he had available due to the congestion of our own services and the large flow of emergencies received during the day. We are indeed preserving urology, since we are the only establishment in western Hérault to provide ongoing care in this specialty. Anyway, we had a lot of work this week, even if we managed to cope. It is clear that the flow is unusual. We welcomed more than 100 people every day. Unfortunately, even if there were more treating doctors, people go to the emergency room…”
“We have decided to close and we will not go back”
The situation in the emergency department at the Champeau clinic is completely different. In fact, it operates without state aid, like a private medical practice. It is open every day from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. with a doctor (there are five partners), a private nurse and a paid secretary. Now, emergency rooms are closed on Sundays and public holidays, but for a very specific reason: “L’ARS (Regional health agency) and Social Security wrote to us to tell us that we could no longer charge €20 more for the service because we worked on Sundays for our convenience, insists, bitterly, Doctor Denis Bouvreau. Yes, we are not a public service, but we do not waste public money. It’s shameful to write such a thing to a practitioner. We have decided to close and we will not go back.”
“To earn our living, we have to work a lot”
In connection with these “emergencies”, all the specialties offered in other establishments are found, except cardiological emergencies. “Last year, adds Denis Bouvreau, we welcomed 15,000 patients compared to 17,000 in Saint-Privat. While we are closed at 8 p.m. and on Sundays. Why this delta difference? I tell you it’s efficiency. Because we are not employees and the radiologists and others we work with are like us. To earn our living, to pay our expenses, we have to work a lot.”
And the doctor denounces: “The administrative services do not know the terrain. They never come to see how we work. They are very far from the reality that we experience with our patients. From my point of view, the employed doctors are dragging their feet. It is for all these reasons that we have had a very bad experience with the ARS mail. Here, in Béziers, we have taken the patients hostage.”
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