- Title: 'We feel powerless': French emergencies nurse's fatigue on Covid-19 frontline
- Date: 10th April 2020
- Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (APRIL 10, 2020) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (French) EMERGENCIES NURSE ORIANE PLUMET SAYING: "We have patients who come in, that who need to be monitored, who may need a bit of oxygen, and then, in fact, within a few minutes, we see the level of oxygen fall very rapidly, even though we carried out oxygen therapy at a high concentration. These are patients we have great difficulty stabilising, who need to be transferred to the intensive care unit, and to be intubated very quickly."
- Embargoed: 24th April 2020 15:07
- Keywords: French nurse coronavirus emergency hospital
- Location: PARIS, FRANCE
- City: PARIS, FRANCE
- Country: France
- Topics: Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA004C8WPOHZ
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Oriane Plumet, a nurse at the emergencies unit at a hospital in central Paris, returned to her apartment south of the River Seine at around 8 a.m. from a 10-hour night shift on Friday (April 10) after taking care of patients hit by the new coronavirus.
Every day, the unit where she works at the La Pitie Salpetriere hospital receives about 100-200 patients over a 24-hour period, Plumet says, most of them suffering from respiratory problems caused by Covid-19.
Plumet said patients' conditions can turn very quickly and sometimes hard decisions have to be made.
"After discussing with intensive care, they're going to say 'In fact this patient's condition is too serious, with pre-existing health problems which are too substantial for their chances of survival to be good enough'," she said.
"For those patients, they're going to say 'We aren't putting them in intensive care, we aren't intubating them, you are going to have to look after them and accompany them as best you can'... and if that means accompanying them until they die that's our job too," she added.
Plumet hopes this crisis will show just how important healthcare funding is in the country.
"I hope that this will allow our leaders to realise that hospitals today, healthcare in its entirety, need the funding, and there are high stakes, as without healthcare, without taking care of people, I don't know what will become of society tomorrow," she said.
The number of people in intensive care units (ICU) for coronavirus infection in France fell slightly for the first time since the start of the epidemic, according to health ministry data on Thursday, but the number of people dying in nursing homes jumped by more than 50 percent over two days.
France as a whole has more than 86,000 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus and has registered more than 12,210 deaths, the fourth highest death toll in the world after Italy, Spain and the United States.
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