On Monday, August 12, at 1:30 p.m., the caregivers of the emergency room of Carpentras (Vaucluse) put up barriers at the entrance and closed the doors. Since then, every day, after lunchtime, the service stops taking care of patients who do not really need to go to the emergency room. In other words, the « bobologie »as doctors call it. On Friday, August 30, in the face of patient discontent, the physical barriers were removed. But the protocol decided this summer remains. Time is time, and in the afternoon and at night, only cases deemed imperative get through.
It was necessary to find a way to reduce the pressure a little, while the emergency services in Carpentras are suffering from a medical shortage, with five “full-time equivalents” of emergency doctors, when ten to twelve would be needed. From now on, the entrance is therefore “regulated”as in many services in the country that have set up this system, not without provoking severe reactions among patients, who initially understood the idea of closure behind this word.
“Saying that the emergency rooms are closed is stupid. When we have sixty patients a day, we are not closed.”repeats the interim director of the establishment, Pierre Pinzelli, also head of the Avignon hospital center. “adjustments” necessary for this new operation, enacted for the next three months, have been decided.
After 1:30 p.m. and until 8:30 a.m., only patients requiring the hospital’s technical platform – either imaging, biology, or procedures (suture, drain insertion, etc.) – or in life-threatening emergencies are admitted, he explains. The others are redirected. The rule may seem simple, but it is not obvious, as it calls into question certain fundamentals of these services, the “gateway” to the hospital, and sometimes the only medical “open door” in a territory.
“Educating people”
“Psychologically, for the doctor, this allows him to know that after 1:30 p.m. it stops arriving in a continuous flow.”explains Mathilde Winter, the head of the emergency department, as she walks through the corridors of her department, which is undersized compared to the number of people who have doubled in twenty years, and is currently undergoing construction on an extension of almost 1,000 square metres.
In recent months, “non-urgent” patients could wait six hours, seven hours, eight hours… “We found ourselves with people who had arrived at 6 p.m. and who we didn’t see until 2 a.m.!”she describes. The atmosphere was sometimes unbearable. The new operation should also make it possible to“educate people”we hope in the ranks of emergency doctors: the angina, the sprain from three days ago, the urinary infection… it’s not in the emergency room that it happens.
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