It was after 7 years that Aurélie let go of her nurse’s gown. 7 years, during which she saw her working conditions deteriorate, and even more with the arrival of the Covid. “We were exhausted morally, physically, not supported enough in my opinion, it was a lot of pressure. It was really the trigger for me to leave ” remembers Aurélie Villard, a former hospital nurse.

The health crisis has worsened the situation

From the first wave, the young woman was mobilized to the hospital, still in her psychiatry department. Very quickly, she saw patients decompensating because of the health crisis, but also patients arriving with much more serious pathologies.

“Suicides, on duty in the hospital, is something that is quite rare. It happens maybe once or twice a year. There, we had three suicides in the space of a month, which is enormous, and it clearly showed the suffering of the patients who were welcomed in our services. And every time we opened the door, we knew that at such and such a door, or at such and such a door, we would find someone who was committing suicide ” explains the former nurse.

Other departures are expected

After the health crisis, hospitals fear a wave of departures. “At the end of the first wave, we had a lot of departures of nurses and a lot of departures of doctors. And there, the second wave, we know which doctors are ready to leave and there are also a lot of nurses who are going to leave.

Government policy continues: bed closures, restructuring, job cuts, in themselves they have not changed their intrinsic policy at all. We went back to the shortcomings that we denounced two years ago ” explains Pierre Schwob Tellier, hospital nurse, of the Inter-Urgences Collective.

If more and more nurses want to leave, their careers were already short, even before the Covid crisis. According to the national union of nursing professionals, 30% of them give up their profession within 5 years of graduating.