Caregivers demonstrated outside the Robert-Débré hospital in Paris on May 21, 2020 to save the hospital and ask for more resources, beds and recognition by salary, in this period of health crisis due to Covid-19. – ISA HARSIN / SIPA
“The government must live up to what the hospital has given,” said Frédéric Valletoux, president of the Fédération hospitalière de France (FHF), in an interview Sunday at Sunday newspaper. “The real tribute to caregivers would be to not make fun of them with broken promises. “At a time when the government is about to launch
his “Ségur de la santé” after the coronavirus health crisis, “the emergency”, according to the president of the FHF, is the increase in salaries of hospital staff.
The upgrading of careers promised by the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, “It’s positive and it’s the urgency. Recognition must be given to nurses, nursing assistants, and maintenance workers by offering them more decent remuneration from the start of their careers. This must be commensurate with their social utility, ”insists Frédéric Valletoux.
“The first medical desert in France is the hospital: almost 30% of positions are not filled there,” he recalls, pleading in particular to “reduce the pay gaps between public and private, which weaken the hospitals ”.
“So far, reforms have had the art of avoiding the real issues”
The consultations of the “Ségur de la santé”, the name of the street where the ministry is located, will open Monday for seven weeks around the issues of salary increases, but also working time, governance and hospital funding . They will be coordinated by the former secretary general of the CFDT Nicole Notat, and some of the measures selected could appear in the next budget of the Social Security.
For Frédéric Valletoux, “this is a historic opportunity” and “the government must learn from past mistakes” because, “so far, the reforms have had the art of avoiding real issues, such as funding, rationalization of expenditure by the relevance of care or medical deserts. The worst would be a return to technocratic and economic management to the detriment of the real needs of patients ”.
Among the demands of the FHF, which will participate in this consultation, Frédéric Valletoux evokes the need to “introduce exceptions to the 35-hour working week”, to “reform management and governance with a” simplification shock “”, or even increase investment in hospitals by “two billion a year”.
