First modification: 04/04/2020 – 11:08Last modification: 04/04/2020 – 11:06
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Paris (AFP)
It was unthinkable for Fantine Georget, a medical student, to sit idly by as his country faced the worst health crisis since World War II and decided to do its bit in the fight against the coronavirus in France.
Like the majority of her colleagues at the Faculty of Medicine of the Nîmes-Montpellier University, in the south of France, this 22-year-old woman volunteered to reinforce the teams of the center for medical regulation of emergencies, saturated in full coronavirus pandemic.
“My last two weeks of internships in the hospital were canceled because, since we were not indispensable, the management preferred not to expose us. So I had free time to help in another way,” this fifth-year medical student tells AFP.
After a very fast training and under the supervision of a medical professional, he answers the calls received by the emergency number in France, 15, and his mission is to decide the appropriate response, according to the symptoms described by his patients.
“Many of the callers have symptoms of infection,” says Fantine. For mild cases, your job is to reassure them and explain what precautions they should take, especially to avoid infecting the people with whom they live.
For the most serious cases, the doctors present take over, especially when respiratory failure is detected.
“The first moments were stressful because it was the first time I worked with patients without being able to see them,” says this future doctor, who learned to adapt her language so that patients, on the other end of the phone, can detect their own symptoms.
“It is totally different because in the hospital we see patients. Here the word is our only resource.”
– Up to 7,000 calls per day –
Blanche Lallier, a third-year medical student, did not hesitate for a moment when her university called for volunteers to help the emergency medical regulation services at the Melun hospital in the Paris region, the most affected by the coronavirus in France, a country that already registers more than 6,500 deaths from coronavirus.
This center, which receives around 600 calls a day in normal time, has been overwhelmed in recent weeks. Before the students offered themselves as reinforcement, the patients could wait up to 15 minutes before being treated, with the risks that this implies.
“They needed people because the service was saturated,” Blanche tells AFP, which estimates that on the worst days, they received up to 7,000 calls.
He asks three people on the other end of the phone three questions: Are you having trouble breathing? Do you have a chronic illness? Are you a medical professional? If they answer yes to one of the three, transfer the call to one of the doctors present.
If all the answers are negative, it tells them that a doctor will call them back in a couple of hours to give them all the necessary information about COVID-19, a disease until recently unknown in the world.
But many only need to speak to feel calmer and accompanied in this unprecedented situation.
This 20-year-old student remembers with great emotion the call of a man, worried about his asthmatic wife, who was in contact with her mother-in-law, who tested positive for the coronavirus.
“The man burst into tears and there was no way to calm him down,” he says. “You feel a lot of helplessness,” confesses the young woman.
© 2020 AFP
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