A severe burn requires extremely specific care, for which very few hospitals are equipped in France. “In Caen or Rennes, there is no, notes Thomas Delomas, boss of Samu 50 in Saint-Lô. Severe burn victims are extremely heavy patients, it has already happened to me, from the Channel, to send them to Tours, Nantes, Paris, and sometimes even to Belgium…”
And again, there should be no massive influx of this type of injured: no European country has the means capable of absorbing more than twenty of them simultaneously.
“A first in France, of unprecedented scale”
This is the whole aim of the major maneuvers undertaken by the AP-HP and the Paris Samu, Wednesday May 22 in Cherbourg. To organize them, a final videoconference with more than thirty participants was held this Tuesday. A full-scale exercise, called Formidable, involving around a thousand participants including doctors and medical staff from all over France, Civil Protection, Red Cross and many others. Intended to update the European doctrine of intervention in such a situation, “this is a first in France and of unprecedented scale”.
What scenario for this giant exercise?
A ferry has just caught fire off the coast of La Hague. The fire is out of control, and a disaster medicine scenario begins. It will all start in the afternoon, with the makeup of the first “victims” at the Pasteur hospital. Then a specially chartered Airbus will arrive, one of those which intervened between Antilles and mainland France during the Covid, then a TER to be equipped on site (this has never been done, only TGVs were used during the Covid), “the interest being that the TERs cover the entire territory”.
Orchestrated by CORRUSS, a multidisciplinary team of crisis management experts, the exercise will last until the early morning of Thursday. Its date was not chosen at random: it fits as close as possible to two major events to come in France, with the 80e anniversary of D-Day and the Olympic Games.
#France
