School health: "In some schools, nurses alone manage 2,300 students"

School nurses called for a white march on Tuesday to protest their working conditions, highlighted by a Finance Committee briefing report on "school medicine and school health"

School health: "In some schools, nurses alone manage 2,300 students"

School nurses called for a white march on Tuesday to protest their working conditions, highlighted by a Finance Committee briefing report on "school medicine and school health". Presented by the deputy (Renaissance) of Essonne Robin Reda to the National Assembly on May 10, it warns of the lack of health personnel at school to meet the needs of students.

France has 7,700 school nurses for 12 million pupils and students. A figure far from sufficient to ensure the 18 million consultations carried out each year in schools, according to figures from the unions. Result: according to a survey conducted by the Snics-FSU in May 2021, two out of three nurses say they are suffering from professional suffering and 66% of them plan to retrain.

Le Point: Why are you calling to protest today?

Anne Fabrega: We regret having to continue to fight to defend our place as close as possible to the students, whose heart of life is the school. Taking us out of school means preventing students from having access to a first-line health professional and from benefiting from an open consultation, free of charge and without any particular reason. It's outrageous, especially given the state of health of our students since the Covid.

We are fighting for there to be hiring and a salary increase. We are the only nurses not to receive the index salary supplement, while the school remained open during the Covid thanks to the teachers and nurses, who were there from the first to the last day. I, for example, have been at the National Education for twenty-four years, thirty years in the public service, and I receive 2,200 euros per month. It is not surprising that there are problems in terms of recruitment.

What are you asking?

We are calling for the creation of 15,000 jobs to meet the needs of the 12 million pupils and students in our country to support them as best as possible into adulthood and provide them with individual and collective health education throughout throughout schooling.

We often speak of medical deserts, but never of the nursing desert. I must have about 1,500 students under my responsibility and I can sometimes conduct 50 consultations a day. I don't know what other health professional can carry out, alone, such a number of consultations during the day. In some establishments, nurses alone manage 2,300 students.

The quality of the premises in which we work also leaves a lot to be desired: the partitions are made of cigarette paper and do not guarantee the confidentiality of the student's speech. Sometimes there is not even space for a student to speak safely because another sick student is lying in the same room. Colleagues are exhausted from constantly having to fight for the means to work properly.

In addition, we are regularly diverted from our missions. We are asked to do first aid training, to participate in medical examinations on dangerous machinery to relieve the school doctor... Our missions are unknown to the rest of the educational community and, when we refuse to do these additional tasks because we are overwhelmed, we are referred to the image of the nurse stashed at the National Education, which is completely false. Many of our hospital colleagues come on contract to see and they run off when they find out about the workload and the responsibility we have.

The health of the students is deteriorating day by day. We must not forget that the second cause of death among young people is suicide. We find a strong state of anxiety and abandonment among young people at the moment, so how can we imagine depriving them of nurses, who are their only members of the local health staff?

The Covid did not allow the youngest to learn to be students and it is very difficult to recover this lack. Among the older ones, who followed very rigid health doctrines, the only thing that was valued was protection against the virus and they, for some, lost the taste for learning. Among high school students, there are also major anxieties and dropouts. Fears explode as students are surrounded by insufficient and insufficiently trained staff to support them.