French hospital staff, relatives sue ministers over work-related suicides

Nurse Marie-Laure Satta caresses her face during a pause in her New Year's Eve shift in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at the la Timone hospital in Marseille, southern France, Dec. 31, 2021. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

Paris, France — French healthcare workers and relatives of colleagues who killed themselves have filed a legal complaint against two ministers over “deadly working conditions” in public hospitals that they say are causing suicides, their lawyer said Monday.

France’s public hospitals have been forced to drastically slash spending in recent decades, and doctors and nurses have long complained of insufficient staffing and low pay.

Nineteen plaintiffs have now accused Health Minister Catherine Vautrin and Higher Education Minister Elisabeth Borne of allowing “totally illegal and deadly working conditions” for workers and staff in training at hospitals across France, according to the complaint seen by AFP.

They charge in the complaint they filed on Thursday that the ministers hold overall responsibility for workplace harassment and involuntary manslaughter over the deaths by suicide.

A member of Vautrin’s team told AFP she did not wish “to comment at this stage”.

An official in Borne’s ministry said it “supports the health workers and their loved ones who have had to live through such serious human dramas”.

The official added that the ministry was committed to “fully cooperating” with the judiciary.

The complaint described a system of “coercion to illegally organise work overtime”, “threats” and “forced labour outside any regulatory framework” as well as “totalitarian” management practices.

Case files had been “individually or systematically completely ignored”, with “no political awareness or willingness to change” current public hospital policies, it read.

It said conditions were particularly dire in three hospitals in the northeastern region of Alsace, the Herault area in southern France and the Yvelines region west of Paris, which had “witnessed a particularly preoccupying wave of suicides”.

An occupational health nurse hung himself in his office at a psychiatric hospital in Alsace in 2023 after signalling in several letters his impossible workload and “the harassing behaviour of human resources management”, the complaint said.

Two women studying to be nurses at the same hospital also killed themselves, it added.

Lawyer Christelle Mazza argued that if the public healthcare sector was a private company, its bosses would have been held to account.

“Any boss implementing such mass and repeated restructuring policies like the ones in public hospitals, with such consequences on working conditions, would have been sentenced and the company shut down,” she said.

The complaint, which also targets junior health minister Yannick Neuder, has been lodged with the Republic’s Court of Justice, which deals with cases against members of government.

If you or someone you know is in crisis or struggling with mental illness, here are some resources that are available.

Canada Suicide Crisis Helpline (Call or text 988)

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (1-800-463-2338)

Crisis Services Canada (1-833-456-4566 or text 45645)

Kids Help Phone [phone])

If you need immediate assistance call 911 or go to the nearest hospital.