50 French hospitals hit by long patient delays or summer closures

Around fifty hospital and clinic establishments across France are experiencing difficulties, including long wait times, partially-closed services, closed beds, and a lack of staff, the health minister has said.

Emergency services and hospital wards are suffering especially as a result of summer, which is always a time of high tension - even more than during the rest of the year - due to multiple staff members taking holidays at the same time.

Outgoing Health Minister Frédéric Valletoux said that “around 50 hospitals are under pressure” and “there are delicate situations to address”, in an interview with Ouest France on Tuesday 20. 

However, he said that the situation was less severe than that seen in summer 2022, which had been particularly bad.

Summer pressure and closures

It comes after the emergency departments of several hospitals across France have partially closed their doors or reduced their opening hours since the start of August.

Read more: Several emergency hospital services temporarily closed across France 

For example, in Carpentras (Vaucluse), emergency departments have been open only in the mornings, and the schedule will remain that way for the next three months. In Laval (Mayenne), the emergency room has been closed for eighteen nights in August, and will only be open for six nights in September.

In Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d'Armor), access to emergency departments will be limited until August 26. 

Similarly, in Trévenans (Territoire de Belfort), the Nord Franche-Comté hospital has even activated the ‘plan blanc’ since August 17, faced with “pressure on staff management”, it said. The plan blanc puts the hospital in a state of emergency and enables it to mobilise additional resources and staff.

In Nantes, the Centre hospitalier universitaire (CHU) workers’ unions have formally denounced the “record overcrowding” in the hospital's emergency department, and claimed that four patients have died as a result of waiting too long for treatment in the department since the start of the summer. 

This has been denied by the hospital which states that only one of the patients died of “avoidable” reasons.

Jérémy Beurel of the Force ouvrière (FO) union at the Nantes CHU has said that “a large influx of patients were waiting for inpatient places, which caused waiting times of up to 70 hours for some patients.”

The FO union is calling for the reopening of 120 beds at the hospital, and better pay for nurses.

In Brest, the CGT union has even set up a “wall of shame” to denounce waiting times in the emergency departments. The wall includes Mrs A., 95, who spent 20.5 hours on a stretcher; and Mr K., 91, who spent 29 hours on a stretcher in the emergency room.

‘The key battle is human resources’

Mr Valletoux has admitted that waiting times are a problem. 

He said: “The average waiting time between arrival and discharge from A&E may have risen to nine hours’ in recent weeks…although it is usually around six or seven hours.” 

President of the Fédération hospitalière de France, Arnaud Robinet, said: “The key battle is human resources. We have a shortage of staff.”

He said that the situation depends heavily on region, and individual hospitals, and called for the government to do more to improve the “attractiveness” of healthcare careers, as well as “strengthening the complementary relationship between the public and private sectors”.

In response, the president of the Fédération de l'hospitalisation privée, Lamine Gharbi, said that his hospital members were already working “24 hours a day”, adding, “We have had a difficult summer. It is a good thing we were there. Without us, [public hospitals] would not have made it through July.”

Private emergency services have recorded a 20% increase in activity this year compared with last year, Mr Gharbi said. 

The GCT union has also criticised the government for sending what it sees as mixed healthcare messages. 

“In the past 24 hours, the government has announced 1,510 fewer posts for [medical] interns at the start of the new academic year, and a state of maximum vigilance for the healthcare system to prevent an epidemic of mpox,” it said in a statement.

Overcrowding solutions?

Multiple health ministers - of which there have been seven in the past seven years - have sought to address the issue of overcrowding in emergency departments.

In 2022, then-Health Minister François Braun launched a series of measures designed to ease the pressure, including:

• Encouraging people to call 15 before going to hospital

• Increasing the number of night and weekend shifts for hospital staff

• Creating services d’accès aux soins (SAS), telephone platforms that aim to unite emergency services and community doctors, to find non-critical patients appointments within 24 to 48 hours.

SAS platforms now exist in 93% of regions and are set to be rolled out everywhere by the end of September, the health ministry has said.