Question 15204 — health establishments

Summary

Mr. Damien Maudet questions the Minister of Health, Families, Autonomy and People with Disabilities on the state of preparedness of the public hospital in the face of the risk of the emergence of a new pandemic, while several international health alerts today evoke a possible increased spread of the Hantavirus. The covid-19 crisis has left a painful memory in the country. Thousands of exhausted caregivers, services saturated, patients transferred across France for lack of available beds, massive deprogramming of care and, finally, the general confinement of the population to avoid the complete collapse of the hospital system. If the virus was unpredictable, the fragile state of the public hospital had been known for years. Hospital staff were already warning about the lack of beds, the closures of services, the shortage of caregivers and budgetary austerity imposed on health establishments. And already, the Government ignored them. However, despite the collective trauma of this pandemic, budgetary restriction policies have continued: since 2022, more than 10 billion euros in hospital savings have been made by austerity budgets. Working conditions at the hospital have continued to deteriorate, so difficulties in recruiting nursing staff have increased. And the bed closures continued: between 2017 and 2020, 12,200 beds were eliminated. Since 2020, more than 23,000 beds have disappeared. Across the country, health professionals describe a hospital running out of steam. Unfortunately, a sad recent report from the Court of Auditors provides the beginning of an answer to the question of the state of preparation of the public hospital: today, the French are more likely to die from an infection in hospital than from a road accident. The report highlights in particular that budgetary constraints and lack of staff have direct consequences on patient safety. The fault lies in decades of savings made on their backs and which the Government is methodically pursuing. In this context, the concern is immense faced with the possibility of a new major health crisis. Many French people are wondering today if the country would really be able to cope without reliving the same situation as in 2020, with hospital saturation leading to generalized confinement. He asks him if, in the event of a new major epidemic, the health system is really prepared to deal with it.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

Timeline

No timeline events have been ingested for this record yet.

Votes

No vote records are attached yet.

Versions

No version snapshots stored. Document URLs remain at the source.

Documents

No documents linked.

Sponsors

No sponsors or actors listed by the source.

Related records

No cross-record relationships stored yet.