SNCF enters the dance. After the Air Force and the French Navy, the rail operator will also evacuate Covid-19 patients from cities where hospitals are saturated to regions where there is no shortage of resuscitation beds. Thursday morning, a health TGV will leave Strasbourg, direction Pays de Loire. "A first in Europe" , explains the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, who announced the operation on Tuesday.
Read also: Coronavirus: in Mulhouse, in the heart of the storm
On board, twenty resuscitation patients from hospitals in Strasbourg and Mulhouse who will be dispatched on arrival in different teaching hospitals (Angers, Nantes, Le Mans, La Roche-sur-Yon). The authorities have chosen the Pays de Loire as a destination because it is the French region least affected by the epidemic. Concretely, it is a classic two-story TGV which usually accommodates hundreds of passengers.
Read also: Coronavirus: highly contagious patients in the first days of infection
In its sanitary configuration, the patients will be four per car. Their stretchers will be placed on the seats which are not dismantled. In each car, there will be an anesthetist, an intern, a nurse anesthetist and three conventional nurses. For all patients, a medical report must be communicated before departure with the treatment it follows. What to react if, during the journey, his condition deteriorates. The wagon bar will serve as a medical space. The medical teams come from the AP-HP (Public Assistance of Hospitals in Paris) and the CHU of Nantes and Angers. It is Samu Paris which coordinates the operation. But, in Strasbourg, he will be supported by the local Samu teams. On the SNCF side, the workforce is doubled compared to a conventional TGV. Thus, there will be two drivers in case and more crew members.
General repetition
The medical team and the SNCF do not go into the unknown. They already tested this concept of UMHF (Mobile Hospital and Rail Unit) last year. Precisely the night of May 21 to 22, 2019 during an exercise called Chardon which had mobilized 400 people. The chosen scenario? A terrorist attack in Metz which required the urgent departure of a TGV from Paris to repatriate the most seriously injured. "We took the example of a terrorist attack but there can be technological disasters or victims of epidemics," explained in a video shot for the occasion, Professor Pierre Carli, boss of the Samu de Paris, who was considering so the case that strikes France today.
Read also: LIVE - Coronavirus: 683 new deaths in Italy, more than 7,500 deaths in the country
The objective is very simple: "The concept is to transform a passenger train into a train which transports the injured and which will allow them to access from city center to city center to heavy hospital plateaus not in the region where they are but in interregion ” , said Professor Pierre Carli.
These operations may have to be repeated, depending on future needs
The General Directorate of HealthThese patient transfers from one region to another began eight days ago. In three rotations, the air force evacuated 18 patients from the Covid-19 in intensive care hospitalized in Mulhouse. Some went to Marseille, others to Bordeaux, the last to Quimper and Brest. These flights were carried out by A330s used to evacuating war wounded. And last Sunday, a helicopter carrier of the national navy, with a hospital on board, brought back to Marseille twelve patients hospitalized in Ajaccio. "These operations may have to be repeated, depending on future needs , " said the Directorate General of Health on Wednesday.
