TESTIMONY. Admitted to the emergency room, they left me 2 hours on a stretcher in the cold

Drama in the hospital. On September 1, 2022, an 81-year-old patient died in the emergency room of Strasbourg University Hospitals (HUS) after having waited twenty hours on a stretcher.

The octogenarian’s lifeless body was found during a shift change. The Force Ouvrière (FO) union wrote to the Minister of Health François Braun to sound the alarm in the face of “the recurrence of the deterioration of care and the deleterious operation of emergencies”.

Unfortunately, this patient is not the first to have been the victim of negligence on the part of the emergency medical staff. Sandy, 50, had a similar experience which she was lucky to survive in 2013. For Planet, she testifies.

In January 2013, the mother of the family gave birth to twins. Already in her forties, Sandy had a risky pregnancy that ended in a difficult delivery, following which she was placed in intensive care, far from her babies. In addition, the mother of six had to have her cervix removed. A series of traumatic events, which Sandy thought she would leave behind when she finally returns home.

“Five days after returning home, I woke up one night with severe pain in my stomach, which was not relieved regardless of my position”, begins the mother of the family. Sandy and her spouse call the firefighters, who, once there, do not believe in her suffering. “I live on the third floor, but they didn’t want to take the stretcher and I went down the stairs alone, standing, to the truck,” she sighs.

But the nightmare does not end there. Once she arrives in the emergency room of a town in Val-d’Oise, Sandy is left to her fate, lying on a stretcher placed there, in an emergency corridor, in the middle of a winter night… And this for two hours .

Finally, thanks to her brother-in-law, the mother of the family is taken care of… Really? In reality, the doctors did not give any examination to Sandy, who left the hospital at night after receiving an injection to relieve his pain. “We never identified where the pain came from, I didn’t take any exams,” regrets the 50-year-old, forced to return home with fear in her stomach.