If you live in the Annemasse area in Haute-Savoie, it is better not to have to go to the emergency room of the Pays de Savoie Private Hospital (HPPS). Its emergency department is in fact closed until Monday morning. The reason? The violent attack on its staff on Wednesday evening by two men, two brothers according to Le Parisien, which left six caregivers injured, its management said on Thursday.
“The service staff are in a real state of psychological shock,” a spokesperson for the establishment told AFP. Two men, a patient and his companion according to the daily Le Dauphiné, were arrested Thursday during the day and placed in police custody. According to the hospital, the attack occurred around 11 p.m. while one of the two suspects, both “aged around thirty”, was waiting on a stretcher in the treatment area as as a patient after administrative treatment.
A very violent attack
Coming from outside, his companion then managed to sneak into the department whose doors were closed before attacking a nurse “verbally and physically”, “dissatisfied” after about “ten minutes of waiting” as part of the charge. “He pushed her, dragged her by the hair” before being joined by his accomplice who was on the stretcher. Around fifteen emergency members including a doctor “came to the aid of their colleague”, receiving blows from the two men who “then fled” by car, according to the same source. Among the fourteen personnel involved, “all in a state of psychological shock”, six suffered from “facial swelling” and some from “a cracked rib, trauma to an ankle or a fracture to a hand”. They were all due to file a complaint Thursday evening at the Annemasse police station.
“Monday morning, we will reassess the situation for potentially a reopening” of the service, concluded the management of the hospital, which has 250 beds and whose emergency room records around a hundred daily consultations.
