The French health system was once considered one of the best in Europe and in the world. Currently, it is in an unprecedented crisis, which is particularly worrying at the beginning of summer when the number of patients increases. I travelled around France to look at the situation, understand the causes and find possible solutions.

“We don’t have the proper structures, nor the proper conditions, nor the proper tools, nor enough staff. It’s getting complicated.” That is the picture Maxime Bartolini paints of emergency care. He is a young nurse working at Fréjus St Raphaël hospital on the Côte d’Azur. He has the tone of someone who has been through a lot.

_”We have been working at the limit since December,” he _adds. “All the surrounding hospitals are repeatedly closed at night. This is a danger for the patients and an overload for us. We do more than our duties, we help each other. We do what we can, but now we don’t have many solutions left, so the situation is becoming catastrophic.”

Fréjus St Raphaël is the main hospital in the Var region of southern France. It has five permanent doctors, which is too few compared to other emergency rooms in the region. In Draguignan, about 30 kilometres away, the emergency room has been closed at night on and off since October. About twenty permanent doctors would be needed to run the service. There are seven. The 100,000 inhabitants of the region have to accept an extra 40 minutes’ drive to reach the nearest hospital in Fréjus.

The head of the emergency room at Fréjus St Raphaël tells me that patients sometimes have to stand in the corridor with other patients for up to 48 hours.

This acute shortage of doctors not only affects the south of France in summer, but the whole country all year round. The pandemic has exposed the long-standing dilemma of European health systems. The exhaustion caused by Covid has accelerated the exodus of health professionals. There are simply more people leaving than young doctors and nurses coming in.

Severe crisis

This deep crisis has dominated the political debate in the run-up to the French general election in June. French President Emmanuel Macron launched a month-long mission to find solutions earlier this summer. I met the man leading Macron’s “lightning mission” in Paris. François Braun, an emergency doctor and president of the Samu-Urgences de France union, was appointed health minister shortly after filming this report.

He is convinced that the emergency department crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. For emergency departments to work, the entire health system needs to be fundamentally transformed. He is ready to do that.

The medical staff fighting the pandemic on the front line are now demanding more than applause. They want the means to do their jobs. And that is literally a matter of life and death.