The announcement gives figures that are totally wrong.
Absolutely wrong!
They don't match what we
see in the clinic,
with the work that we do every day.
I am a psychiatrist at the hospital and day clinic .
I work in two facilities at the same time
because of the staff shortage at the hospital.
There are not enough staff
because, due to the working conditions,
a salary that has been stagnant for over a year
and precarious contracts of three months,
many staff have left the hospital.
In my case, for example, I started with a third
of the patients I look after today.
In the last few months, I've started seeing three times as many.
In the external outpatient clinics, I see 12 to 15 patients per day.
They talk about numbers
that have nothing to do with what we do.
Not only the psychiatrists,
we work in an interdisciplinary way with psychologists,
social work, music therapy,
occupational therapists...
The hospital provides universal care
for psychological health and general medical care.
We have dentistry, general medical care, laboratory, pharmacy...
It's a model hospital,
and they're cutting it in a way that it can't function.
They claim that it wasn't working.
That is a lie.
The hospital never stopped functioning.
Since last Wednesday, when we learned of the 200 layoffs,
we have been working with reduced, minimal care, doing what we can,
those of us who have not been laid off yet,
but we also do not have a contract yet,
those of us who have not been fired,
don't have a contract from the Ministry of Health,
we provide our service all day long.
Even the dismissed colleagues continue,
because of their professional ethos,
so that patients are cared for.
We continue to ensure the supply of medications.
We know our professional responsibility.
What is not recognised is what is being done in this hospital
and what we're talking about when we talk about intervention.
I've been a psychiatrist for five years.
Demand for psychiatric care
is constantly increasing.
The social and economic crisis,
is continuing and worsening and intensifying.
We take care of a very vulnerable population,
but also of people who have all kinds of social security,
but who can't get appointments with their providers
or the appointments are in six months or a year from now,
with serious illnesses, with acute illnesses
and we also take care of them,
by billing the social security system.
We leave no one unattended.
Closing this sector also means
denying a large portion of the population
access to health care,
not only to the poorest section or those with drug problems.