Public hospitals must carry out a "
reliable and objective
" count of the working time of their doctors and interns, in order to respect the legal ceiling of 48 hours per week, recalled the Council of State in a series of decisions handed down on Wednesday.
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Seized by three unions of doctors and interns, the Council of State rejected their requests aimed at obliging the government to reinforce the rules in force.
A sham setback, because these decisions are accompanied by a reminder of the law for all public health establishments.
Indeed, the existing law "
necessarily implies
" that hospitals "
have a reliable, objective and accessible system allowing them to count (...) the daily number of hours worked by each agent
", which cannot exceed 48 hours per week over a period of 3 months for interns or 4 months for qualified practitioners.
Important case law for “respect for working time”
The means of precisely measuring this working time come under the "
internal regulations
" of each hospital, and not of the State, which does not have to "
institute a sanction
" for faulty employers as there are nevertheless in the private sector, adds the Council of State.
Contacted by AFP, the president of the Intersyndicale Nationale des Internes (Isni), Gaëtan Casanova, however calls on the government "
to set the terms for implementing this hourly count
" following this "
historic
" decision.
, both "
for the rights of interns
" and "
for patients who will no longer be systematically cared for by exhausted caregivers
".
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His counterpart from the Young Doctors union, Emmanuel Loeb, considers for his part that the jurisprudence of the Council of State "
will make it possible to seize the competent courts in the event of non-compliance with working hours
", whose responsibility also depends "
on the medical community, including department heads
.
More mixed, the president of Action Praticiens Hôpital (APH), Jean-François Cibien, considers that the rejection of his request is "
a defeat
", which leaves no other possibility than "
individual appeals
" for the 135,000 doctors and hospital interns, at the risk of clogging up the administrative courts.