“We need a budget that matches”: Rémi Salomon believes that “the public hospital is in great difficulty”

He is sounding the alarm. “The public hospital is in great difficulty. We have a deficit that is estimated at around two billion at the end of the year,” said the president of the Conference of Hospital Medical Commissions, Rémi Salomon, on franceinfo this Wednesday morning. “Which is considerable, we have never reached this level,” he warned.

“My fear is that if we tighten the budget (from the public hospital) as we did in the years 2010-2020, we will again have insufficient staff and deteriorating working conditions,” he also stated. “The momentum that we are currently seeing – with a resumption of activity, better recruitment, particularly of nurses, and retention – risks being cut off. And that worries us.”

“We need a budget that matches the size”

Rémi Salomon hammered home that “health has a cost” and that “this cost increases” year after year. “The budget (for public hospital) must increase every year. It increases, but not enough,” he said. “We must not tighten the rope again and end up with insufficient staff. For health, we need a budget that is up to par,” insisted the man who is also president of the Medical Commission of the Public Assistance – Paris Hospitals (AP-HP). He demands that this budget be calculated “according to the needs” of the health sector.

On the state of the public hospital, Rémi Salomon assures that “the emergency rooms were saturated again this summer in smaller hospitals”. “It’s a problem that we know every summer which is the reflection of a global dysfunction”, he added, taking as an example the “lack of downstream beds” in the hospital, but also the problem of “access to care” in the city. In the larger establishments on the other hand, everything “went rather well”. In Paris, there was “no influx linked to the Olympic Games”.