Gérald Claudet was admitted to the emergency room of Langres hospital at the end of October for intestinal inflammation. He says he was transferred in the middle of the night to a curious space: the garage of an intervention vehicle (Smur), a particularly uncomfortable and noisy place.
A situation which plunged him into “total disarray” and “shocked” him, he testified to BFMTV this weekend. “I am I don’t know where. In times of war, in a place where the sick are placed? I don’t really know where we are, but in any case not in a French hospital,” denounced Gérard Claudet on the 24-hour news channel (below). Many other media then reported the affair in turn.
In a statement sent on Tuesday, the Grand Est Regional Health Agency (ARS) said it had already inspected this establishment for similar facts in 2023 and had then issued an injunction to “immediately cease the unacceptable use of the “Smur garage” premises. for the installation of patients”. “The ARS is now carrying out additional investigations to understand the conditions under which a patient could have once again been hospitalized in this premises and to mobilize with the establishment all the necessary actions to put a definitive end to such practices”, according to the same statement.
Do not “endorse this mistreatment”
The management of Langres hospital did not wish to react. “What this patient denounced has been going on for several long months” in Langres, since the reduction of “around twenty beds” in 2023 in this center due to a reduction in nursing staff, explains Véronique Midy, general practitioner near Langres and co-president of Egalité-Santé, a local association bringing together more than 600 caregivers.
“It is not satisfactory, but it is what the caregivers themselves preferred to do rather than being in a situation where we do not have the possibility of taking care of” the patients, adds- she said. In the situation of “big medical desert” in which Haute-Marne finds itself, believing that ambulatory care will make it possible to compensate for the reduction in the number of hospital beds is an illusion, estimates Vincent Escudier, emergency doctor at Langres hospital and representative union SUdF (Samu-Urgences de France).
As patients are unable to have medical appointments “before 5 or 7 days, they end up arriving in the emergency room” and saturating them, explains Mr. Escudier, who says he recently resigned from his position as head of emergency at Langres for not “endorsing this mistreatment”. A new hospital is to be built in Langres in a few years. But the project is also controversial, because it provides even fewer beds and services than the current establishment: it will be a “pseudo-hospital”, according to Vincent Escudier, “a dispensary” for Véronique Midy.
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