If you are lucky enough to be on vacation in the mountains, be very careful. Skiing accidents increase with the lack of snow. And the emergency services are struggling to cope. At the southern hospital in Grenoble, we are even forced to transfer patients.
Each day, dozens of ski injured pour in. “It is in this reception area that the stretchers arrive either with the helicopter or with the firefighters or the ambulances.”
Kelly, a vacationer from the Paris region, fractured her humerus. “A fall on a snowboard, on a red slope. In fact, I wanted to hold my arm back and it actually cracked,” she explains.
“The situation is extremely tense. We are trying to manage as best we can. We have set up a territorial crisis cell with the different clinics in the territory and currently even this system is starting to reach saturation.“, specifies doctor Jean-Jacques Banihachémi, head of emergencies.
The pressure is so great that some skiers are transferred to Lyon. Marc, a tourist from Nantes, broke his femoral neck. “They were so overloaded that they couldn’t operate on me. I arrived on Monday and I only had surgery on a Sunday afternoon. So I waited a week, it was very long,” he regrets. The situation should remain tense throughout the February holidays.
