Paris Journal 2009 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Yesterday’s Le Parisien contained a story that
didn’t surprise me at all. It is about
a significant part of the French health care system, the public
hospitals. (Almost all of the
hospitals are public hospitals.) The hospitals are running at a
574 million euro deficit, so the most expensive ones have been “put on a
diet.” That means cutbacks in medical
personnel and closing of beds. Patrick Pelloux, the leader of
the emergency room doctors’ union, is quoted extensively, just as he was when
he sounded the alarm about the hospitals not being able to deal adequately
with the heat wave of 2003. 15,000 people died in France
during the heat wave of 2003. For
some, death came because a hospital treated them in the emergency room, but
then did not have enough beds and so they were sent home when normally they
would have been admitted. This is happening again this
summer. The hospitals are short on
staff, and beds are closed. The chief
of the medical staff at the Gabriel-Montpied de Clermont-Ferrand hospital says,
“For immediate care, we are functioning with caution. We’ve put in place a protocol for
evaluating the degree of urgency for each sick person. It functions well enough in that they only
have to wait 25 minutes to be seen by medical staff. On the other hand, our principal difficulty
is in finding the beds to hospitalize our patients.” Fifteen percent of the beds there are
closed in July and August by the hospital administrators. This hospital runs a deficit of
8 to 10 million euros. Therefore,
management has closed 100 beds for surgical patients, 200 beds for medical
patients, and 40 beds for gynecological patients. So don’t plan to have a baby in
July or August in France. The understaffing and lack of
beds is driving the medical staff nuts because they’re faced with the
likelihood of a “grippe A” (swine flu) epidemic starting in September, with
the “rentrée.” It is also driving them nuts
because they are just plain tired and overworked. “The horror will be when the
[medical] personnel fall ill,” ironised one doctor. In Paris alone, 700 medical
jobs will be eliminated this year. Patrick Pelloux said, “Madame
Bachelot [Minister of Health] can well talk about increased staffing levels,
but on the ground, we don’t see more medical personnel. The conditions of work are frightening.” Sylvie Moisan at a public
hospital in Nantes says, “Because of the lack of personnel, one doesn’t work
as one should. For example, in the
burn units, the dressings are changed once every two days, when they really must
be changed once a day.” The hospital work force union
in Paris issued a petition that says “We can’t do more. We are at the point of no return. This summer, anything could happen.” The situation is “dramatic,” according to
the petition, and the health services are “at the point of rupture due to
lack of personnel.” There is a “risk
of a new health catastrophe,” an obvious reference to what happened in the
summer of 2003. The problems are not just with
staffing levels. One nurse in the
Hauts-de-Seine says, “I spend my time racing.
We lost 20 out of 60 beds in the two services [visceral surgery and
orthopedic surgery] to allow personnel to take their vacations. In closing the beds, we risk not being able
to hospitalize patients.” She cited a
death that occurred last December when they couldn’t find a place in
intensive care for a patient who was unconscious. She also complains about a lack of
material. “We are three nurses, but we
have only two blood pressure machines and two thermometers to care for
thirty-some patients.” Patrick Pelloux’s main
criticism is the policy of the current administration to run hospitals as
businesses that must be in the black without government subsidy to cover
large deficits. As with so much in life, you get what you pay
for. It is shocking, how quiet Paris
is on this Sunday of the Big Quiet Holiday Weekend. Yesterday, we had some
difficulty in finding newspapers, but we knew it would be that way. We just planned to make a long walk out of
it. We started by strolling in the
hot afternoon air down the shady avenue Émile Zola to the Presse store that
we’d discovered earlier this summer, just past one of our favorite
restaurants, Oh Duo! Alas, it was closed, but we
were pleasantly surprised to see that Oh Duo! will re-open this week. We worked our way back to the
busy Place Charles Michel, which really should
have a Presse shop or newsstand but inexplicably does not. The Beaugrenelle urban renewal project has
replaced the old Presse shop with a bank.
And so we went up the rue St.
Charles in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.
There, at the corner with the rue Ginoux, we found a photocopy shop
that is going to be open Monday through Friday, hopefully, from 9AM to
7PM. This is important, because we
have more copies to make later in the week before sending a package back to
the publisher in New York. We turned onto the lonely rue
Viala and voila! We found the Sophia
Presse shop open for business, with lots of newspapers to sell. This street, by the way, was
named in the late 1890s for Agricole Viala, a young volunteer only 13 years
old, killed during “the campaign of 1793,” also known as the Reign of Terror. Continuing up the rue Viala to
the rue Juge, we turned right because I remembered liking the rue Juge
several years ago. It was grittier
then. Now it is cleaner and nicer, and
I like it even better. It is a quiet street,
but in a super-convenient location not far from the Champ de Mars and the
metro stations at Dupleix and la Motte-Picquet. It has a number of older buildings that
must date back to the days when this was a part of the village of Grenelle,
outside of Paris. I can easily imagine living on
the rue Juge or the rue Tiphaine, which is the eastern extension of the same
street. We completed the circular walk
through the western 15th arrondissement by turning down the rue du
Commerce and going back to the apartment.
It was just a bit too hot to walk more. This morning is much cooler. |
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Tom selects newspapers at the Sophia Presse shop on the
rue Viala.
Older “village-y” house on the rue Juge.
Cute and tiny restaurant on the rue Tiphaine.
Villa Juge, off of the rue Juge. |
