Precariousness, abuse … About “20% of nurses” drop out of school, regrets Braun

The flight of white coats begins at school. Despite the shortage of caregivers, 20% of students in nursing schools “give up their studies”, lamented François Braun on Tuesday, pointing in particular to their financial “precariousness” and the “abuse” suffered during training courses. In the nursing training institutes (Ifsi), which integrate more than 30,000 new students each year, “20%, roughly, abandon their studies” during their three-year course, said the Minister of Health during a meeting with the Association of Social Information Journalists (Ajis). This phenomenon “really worries me a lot”, he added, specifying that “the abandonment of studies” was also “around 10% in medicine”.

Among the nurses, the massive defections are explained first of all by the “problems of precariousness of the students”, in particular of the “scholarships paid late” by the regions, in particular in Ile-de-France, explained the minister. “When you have to wait for the second half of the month for the stock market you have to have on the 1st day, it’s complicated,” he insisted. The renunciation is also linked to “mistreatment during the internship”, which begins as soon as you enter Ifsi. “For their first internship, in the first year, they will end up in nursing homes or geriatrics, it’s almost systematic”, he said, but “as they do not have nursing skills, we says ‘we’re short on caregivers, so you’re going to clean the toilet’ and they get yelled at”.

Conversely, “this type of internship with very high pressure, it is necessary to put them rather at the end of their studies”, he estimated, while for “the first internship, we must make their eyes shine, they must be in sheaves, in the emergency room, in very specialized services”. François Braun also defended the abolition of the entrance examination into the Ifsi, which selected “preformatted young people to fit into the framework”. The selection via Parcoursup, decried by the students, on the contrary makes it possible to attract “young people with completely different backgrounds”, to whom “the training framework must adapt”.