French healthcare workers and families of colleagues who killed themselves have filed a legal complaint against two government Ministers over “deadly working conditions” in public hospitals which they say are causing suicides.
The country’s public hospitals have drastically slashed spending over recent decades, with doctors and nurses having since complained of insufficient staffing and low pay, according to an AFP report in The Citizen.
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 countrywide, according to the complaint filed last week.
They said the Ministers hold overall responsibility for workplace harassment and involuntary manslaughter over the deaths by suicide.
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.
An occupational health nurse hanged 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 added.
Two women studying to be nurses at the same hospital also killed themselves.
Through their lawyer, the complainants said that if the public healthcare sector were a private company, its bosses would have been held to account.
The complaint, which also targets junior Health Minister Yannick Neuder, has been lodged with the Republic’s Court of Justice that deals with cases against members of government.
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