" Call us! insists Lamine Gharbi, the president of the Federation of private hospitalization (FHP) which brings together nearly a thousand establishments in France ( Editor's note: including 460 establishments dedicated to medicine, surgery, obstetrics and follow-up care) . We de-programmed 100,000 non-emergency operations last week and freed 4,000 places in intensive care and critical care in clinics, making a total of more than 10,000 beds made available in the territory to accommodate patients with Covid-19 . "
At the request of the Regional Health Agencies (ARS), the private health establishments are in working order to come to the aid of public hospitals. For ten days, the 460 establishments or private follow-up care services have thus stopped all their day hospitalization activity. In Ile-de-France, 200 establishments are concerned, which offer 300 intensive care beds.
Problem, for several days, hundreds of beds remained empty while public hospitals faced an influx of patients and admitted to having to sort them. Thus, in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), staff denounced, on the FO union's Twitter thread, the CHU's final refusal, last week, to accept the aid offered by two local clinics. And the Doctegestio group, which has nine hospitals, also deplores a sidelining. "Since mid-March we have been available, our beds, our staff are ready," they say at group headquarters.
"The problem is the lack of respirators and staff"
Saturation obliges, in Île-de-France, public-private collaboration is improving. In Paris, "the Bichat hospital has been transferring patients for five days," says an anesthesiologist. At the private hospital in Vitry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne), "after three days of great calm where the doctors were going in circles, the patients started arriving a week ago," says Sophie Bordas, physiotherapist . We already have a full 30-bed floor and we are seeing more and more patients arriving, some by themselves and others from Henri Mondor (in Créteil) or from the Kremlin-Bicêtre ( Editor's note The two big ones public hospitals of the department) ".
Asked Monday about public-private collaboration, Frédéric Valletoux, president of the French Hospital Federation (FHF), which has 1,000 public establishments, is categorical: “The hospital must remain on the front line. There is no shortage of beds. The problem is the lack of respirators and staff: 30% of doctor's positions are vacant. If there is a call to launch, it is to say that if equipment is available in the clinics, that they entrust it to us, and if doctors are idle there, that they knock on the door of the hospitals, they will be welcome ”.
“We have to face it all together, insists Lamine Gharbi, his private sector counterpart. All available resuscitation beds are now occupied. These differences are no match for the imminent approach of the peak of the epidemic. By Friday evening, the Ile-de-France Regional Health Agency has asked the private and public to find 300 and 700 resuscitation beds respectively.