Will caregivers be required to be vaccinated in order to stem the flu epidemic? In any case, it is a “question that will arise”, declared Friday Yannick Neuder, Minister responsible for Health. With a risk of fracture among health personnel, as in the time of covid.
Faced with the flu epidemic, 87 hospitals have triggered the “white plan”, a system which allows certain operations to be canceled or staff to be recalled from leave, the Ministry of Health said on Friday. Yannick Neuder, Minister responsible for Health and Access to Care, spoke, the same day, of a “question that will arise” concerning a possible compulsory vaccination of caregivers.
“All things that can improve the reception conditions for patients and relieve the burden on nursing staff: barrier gestures, and perhaps compulsory vaccination, should be considered,” said the minister.
“A freedom”
Enough to provoke a new standoff between the government and caregivers who would oppose this decision, as at the time of covid-19? For this nurse, interviewed by RMC, the choice to be vaccinated is a matter of “freedom”, which she refuses to give up.
However, she says she is ready to receive the injection in order to keep her job. Because at the time of the health crisis, healthcare personnel who had not been vaccinated were suspended, from September 2021. The obligation was lifted in May 2023. “There will be fraud, there is people who will say that they are going to be vaccinated and who will not be, as for covid”, anticipates this same nurse.
“It costs nothing”
A rejection that Eva, a medical intern for two years who has been vaccinated since the start of the campaign, has difficulty understanding. “I don’t understand anything, we are there for the patients. If the obligation allows us to reduce the number of cases, I don’t see why we wouldn’t get vaccinated, it doesn’t cost anything,” she said.
In hospitals, the number of vaccinated caregivers is still too low. “Not even 10%. I ask the question every day, no one is vaccinated. I have already heard nurses say: ‘If it were important, it would be obligatory'”, notes Mathias Wargon, head of department at emergency room at Saint-Denis hospital.
-Little vaccinated health professionals
Proof that pedagogy no longer works for this doctor, in favor of compulsory vaccination: “Firstly because the epidemic will be less significant, fewer staff will catch it and so as not to pass it on to the caregivers they receive”, he explains.
For some unions, on the other hand, making flu vaccination compulsory would weaken the recruitment of staff, which is already complicated to find and too rare on the market.
Catherine Vautrin, Minister of Labor, Health, Solidarity and Families, called on “those who have not yet been vaccinated” to do so. “When we look at emergency room arrivals and in particular cases of complications, more than 70% of them are people who are not vaccinated and who are eligible people,” she underlined.
In addition to vaccination, “I believe that we have had a bit of a tendency, collectively, to forget barrier gestures” since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, observed the Minister responsible for Health Yannick Neuder, during a travel to Cochin hospital in Paris.
Ameline Lavechin with Léo Manson
