On August 12th, at 1.30 pm, the rescuers of Carpentras (Vaucluse) put up barriers at the entrance and closed the doors. Since then, every day after lunchtime, the service stops treating patients who do not really need to go to the emergency room. In other words, the “bobology”as doctors call it. On Friday 30 August, in response to the discontent of patients, the physical barriers were removed. But the protocol decided during the summer remains in place. Time is time, and in the afternoon and at night only cases considered essential are allowed to pass through.
We had to find a way to reduce the pressure a little, as Carpentras’ emergency rooms suffer from a shortage of doctors, with five “full-time equivalents” of emergency workers, when ten to twelve would be needed. From now on, the entrance is “regulated”As in many services in the country that have implemented this system, not without provoking strong reactions among patients, who initially retained the idea of closure behind this word.
“Saying that the emergency rooms are closed is stupid. When we receive sixty tickets a day, we are not closed.”The interim director of the establishment, Pierre Pinzelli, also director of the Avignon hospital centre, repeats. “settings” The necessary measures for this new operation have been decided upon and will be implemented over the next three months.
After 1:30 p.m. and until 8:30 a.m., only patients who require technical support from the hospital – whether for imaging, biology or procedures (suturing, drain installation, etc.) – or in a life-threatening emergency are admitted, he explains. The others are redirected. The rule may seem simple, but there is nothing obvious about it, since it calls into question certain foundations of these services, the “front door” to the hospital and, sometimes, the only medical “open door” to a territory.
“Educate people”
“Psychologically, for the doctor, this lets him know that after 1:30 p.m. the blood stops flowing continuously.”“Explains Mathilde Winter, head of the emergency department, as she walks through the corridors of her department, which is insufficient compared to the number of patients that have doubled in twenty years, and is in the middle of work on an extension of almost 1,000 square metres.
In recent months, “non-urgent” patients could wait six hours, seven hours, eight hours… “We met people who arrived at 6pm, whom we didn’t see until 2am!”describes. The atmosphere was sometimes unbearable. The new operation should also allow“educate people”We wait in line for emergency doctors: angina, a sprain from three days ago, a urinary infection… it doesn’t happen in the emergency room.
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