Health professionals were waiting for an announcement from the president during his visit to the island. In his speech to the Corsican Assembly, Emmanuel Macron confirmed the 171 million committed to the Ajaccio hospital and reinforced the maintenance of the Porto Vecchio maternity hospital. At the Bastia hospital center, the president limited himself to mentioning the needs of the residents.
“I want Bastia to have a hospital center in the coming years that meets the needs of its residents.”
The announcement was made by the President of the Republic, in the chamber of the Assembly of Corsica, on Thursday, September 28.
Is it a new hospital or modernizing existing infrastructure?
And with what means?
“We are having difficulties accepting all the patients”
Christophe Arnould, director of the Bastia hospital
For the director of the Bastia hospital, if the hospital center is at the forefront in terms of equipment, Upper Corsica lacks beds and must modernize its infrastructure and organization.
“The hospital is really full and we have difficulty accommodating all the patients who come to my establishment, explains Christophe Arnould. That is why we need both a capacity project and an organizational project that allows us to have better logic in the management of our care pathways.”
But, above all, more equitable access to care.
Corsica is the only region in France that does not have a university hospital. In a column signed by 32 medical professors, Professor Laurent Papazian calls for the creation of a true University Hospital Center project.
Because there are not enough specialists in place. To reinforce teams, like him, they are assigned or made available to university hospitals on the continent. A university hospital in Corsica would allow doctors to be trained and maintained on site, as Professor Papazian indicates.
“It is a complete project of the CHU with all the healthcare, teaching and research missions with the main objective of training doctors, general practitioners, doctors of other specialties other than general medicine and who then practice either in our public and private hospital establishments, or on a liberal basis. But if they do their studies mainly in Corsica, there is a much greater chance that they will then stay and settle in Corsica and therefore that the population will benefit from it.”
“It is not possible to bring people to the continent all the time”
Thomas Victorion, first-year medical intern
Nearly 30,000 patients must travel to the mainland each year for treatment. Young interns who train in Bastia support the project.
“The Bastia hospital really needs to become a bigger hospital and supports Thomas Victorion, first-year medical intern. It is not possible to bring people to the continent all the time, to always waste time in care, whether in major resuscitations, in strokes, in heart attacks, in all emergencies… And then in more specialized things, like in pediatrics, we are constantly forced to bring them to Marseille or Nice, it is not possible.
For deputy Michel Castellani, who led the CHU project, this is not contradictory to a new hospital.
“Both the subjects are not opposable, says the parliamentarian. A CHU is when You bring teachers, students who are training in medicine, in their future profession. A new hospital is an instrument. It’s like if you build a top-level football team and you build a stadium next to it, the two go together. Here we are exactly in this logic. One is not opposable to the other, on the contrary.”
CHU or new hospital, health professionals and elected officials, all stakeholders are waiting for details.
Find the report by Sybille Broomberg and Daniel Bansard:
video duration: 00h02mn54s
Bastia Hospital: what reactions to Emmanuel Macron’s announcements? • ©S. BROOMBERG – D. BANSARD / FTV
