European healthcare workers and their families of coworkers who committed suicide have sued two ministers in Paris over “deadly working conditions” in public hospitals, according to their solicitor, who was quoted as saying on Monday.
In recent years, France’s public hospitals have been forced to drastically reduce spending, and doctors and nurses have longer complained of understaffing and reduced pay.
According to the issue seen by AFP, nineteen plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against Health Minister Catherine Vautrin and Higher Education Minister Elisabeth Borne for allowing” utterly illegal and dangerous operating conditions” for employees and workers in training at public hospitals across France.
In their complaint filed on Thursday, they allege that the officials are ultimately to blame for the deaths of their own suicides.
A Vautrin’s staff member informed AFP that she did not wish to” comment at this time.”
Borne was also contacted by AFP, and he was not quickly available for comment.
The complaint described a system of” coercion to illegally organize work overtime,”” threats” and “forced labor outside any regulatory framework,” as well as” totalitarian” management practices.
Case files had been “individually or systematically ignored,” and there was” no political awareness or willingness to change” the current public hospital policies, it read.
In three hospitals in Alsace’s northeastern region, Herault in southern France, and Yvelines in east of Paris, where” a particularly preoccupant flood of suicides was witnessed,” the report claimed conditions were “particularly dire”.
An occupational health caregiver hung himself in his Alsace office in 2023 after expressing in some words his difficult task and” the taunting behavior of human resources management,” according to the problem.
Two other women who were studying to become nurses at the same medical likewise committed suicide, it added.
If the public healthcare industry were a private enterprise, according to prosecutor Christelle Mazza, its executives would have been held accountable.
She said that any boss who had put forth quite extensive and incessant restructuring measures as those found in open hospitals, with like adverse effects on working conditions, would have been punished and the business shut down.
The Republic’s Court of Justice, which hears cases against members of state, has received the complaint that likewise concerns junior health secretary Yannick Neuder.
