“Everyone is shocked. We transpose…” On the forecourt of the Pasteur 2 hospital in Nice, Jordan (1) sighs. He struggles to find the words in the face of the horror inspired in him by the death of Carène, this 37-year-old nurse killed by a lunatic in Reims. “A colleague… It’s horrible. She’s doing her job, she’s there to take care of people, and she loses her life. It’s completely disgusting. You’re not supposed to get stabbed in your place of work. work!”
Jordan is only a few years older than Carene. He soon has twenty years in the hospital as a state-certified nurse, mostly in the emergency room. He now works at the Nice University Hospital. He got two punches in the face. Physical or verbal attacks, he has long since stopped counting them.
“It’s always been there, but it’s getting worse and worse, confides this quadra, witness to the malaise of caregivers. Aggression is more and more palpable in the emergency room. People are angry, demanding, unable to handle frustration. And some families are very aggressive. As soon as we advise to go through the process with the general practitioner for a problem that is not urgent, we are told that we are useless, that we are incompetent.
Explosive cocktail
The two punches? They illustrate two symptomatic situations.
The first involves a patient on cocaine. “He pretended to be unconscious. But with experience, you quickly make the difference. I said to him: “To help you, I need you to answer my questions.” There, he opens his eyes and says to me: “Do you think I’m faking it?” And he punches me in the face. He confirmed that I was right…”
Jordan was not specially sounded, “but surprised.”
The blow earned him a small wound in his mouth. It was there, again, that he picked up a second punch. This time, “He was a shrink patient, a little in crisis. Rather calm. But as soon as we approached, boom! Punch in the face.”
Drugs, alcohol, psychiatric pathologies… The emergency cocktail is “conducive to these situations of violence”, notes Jordan. He sometimes gets kicked there, “good slaps” of elderly people – “the only population that I excuse”. Insults? “It’s daily.” After the punches, Jordan filed a complaint: “No news…”
“Teams at the end”
Can the reduced workforce, the lengthening deadlines, explain these drifts, if not justify them? “Probably it doesn’t help, admitted Jordan. And then, the teams are exhausted. They are exhausted. Understaffing is almost every day. It’s snowballing.”
The twenty-year-old nurse is bitter. “People need us, and are not grateful. We don’t take care of caregivers. I didn’t do this job to be a cop! But sometimes I feel like one.. .”
Should there be police, real ones, in the corridors of the hospital? Maybe, says Jordan. Should caregivers be trained in self defense? “We’re not here to fight, even if it feels like we’re fighting all the time…”
For the time being, these attacks are already weighing down a daily “too heavy”. To the point of making Jordan think, like others, of leaving the emergency room. “It would weigh a lot on me. Because I like it. For the gratitude of the patients. Unfortunately, the population is disgusting us with our profession.”
1. His first name has been changed to preserve his anonymity.