Salary increases, “hardship”… Liberal nurses in the street this Saturday

Filter barriers on toll booths, towing at stations, rallies: liberal nurses are taking to the streets this Saturday, the day of winter vacations between zones A and C, to demand upgrades and recognize the “difficulty of job". According to the Angry Nurses union collective, instigator of a sustained mobilization since the end of January, “twenty gathering points” are planned for this Saturday.

Towing operations with sometimes “filter dams with slowdowns” will be organized, in particular on tolls in Toulouse and Nîmes, on a bridge in Aix-en-Provence, on the squares of the stations of Nantes, Saint-Nazaire or La Baule (Loire-Atlantique), or in the center of Lille, mostly at midday or early afternoon. Gatherings have already taken place this week, in front of the primary health insurance funds of Grenoble, Annecy (Haute-Savoie), Chambéry (Savoie) or Bordeaux for example, and snail operations have also been organized in these cities.

These professionals are demanding an increase in the prices of their procedures (reimbursed by social security) such as injections, dressings or blood tests, which have not been revised upwards for 15 years, despite sustained inflation. “There are treatments that we can no longer provide, because we are almost at a loss,” the co-president of the collective, Gaëlle Cannat, a nurse in Bouches-du-Rhône, explains to AFP. For nurses in rural areas who have to travel long distances, “being paid 7.25 euros gross per hour, for the procedure and the travel, is no longer financially tenable”.

These nurses also demand a simplification of the “paperwork” imposed on them and a significant increase in mileage allowances, today higher for physiotherapists or doctors, while “the price of fuel is the same for everyone” , they emphasize. “Which profession would tolerate losing more than 20% of purchasing power?” also asks the Convergence Nursing union, which supports the movement.

Between the days which “start at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. or 6 a.m.”, the “pathologies” and pain linked to the handling of sometimes heavy patients, the demonstrators want to see the “drudgery of the profession” recognized and ask to retire at 60 years, or 62 years at full rate. Launched at the end of January in the Rhône-Alpes region in the wake of the farmers' movement, the mobilization has given rise to several dozen local demonstrations since. It is difficult for these liberals to “strike”, in particular because of the permanence of care. But “this Saturday, things will move a lot,” promises Gaëlle Cannat.

Invited this week on France 2, the new Minister for Health Frédéric Valletoux called for “better recognition” and “probably better pay” for liberal nurses. “And perhaps under the guise of doctors, being able to increase their skills, it is a project which will free up medical time,” declared the minister on the Télématin set, claiming to understand “their demands” and planning to “receive them”.