French healthcare workers and relatives of colleagues who died by suicide have filed a legal complaint against two ministers, alleging "deadly working conditions" in public hospitals are causing the deaths. The nineteen plaintiffs accuse 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 public hospitals across France.
The complaint, filed on Thursday, charges the ministers with overall responsibility for workplace harassment and involuntary manslaughter due to the suicides. It describes a system of "coercion to illegally organize work overtime," "threats," and "forced labor outside any regulatory framework," along with "totalitarian" management practices. The plaintiffs claim that case files have been "individually or systematically completely ignored," with "no political awareness or willingness to change" current public hospital policies.
The complaint highlights particularly dire conditions in three hospitals in the northeastern region of Alsace, the Herault area in southern France, and the Yvelines region west of Paris, which have "witnessed a particularly preoccupying wave of suicides." One case cited involves an occupational health nurse who hung himself in his office at a psychiatric hospital in Alsace in 2023, after repeatedly signaling his impossible workload and "the harassing behaviour of human resources management" in several letters. Two women studying to be nurses at the same hospital also died by suicide.
France's public hospitals have faced drastic spending cuts in recent decades, leading to long-standing complaints from doctors and nurses about insufficient staffing and low pay. Lawyer Christelle Mazza argues that if the public healthcare sector were a private company, its bosses would have been held accountable. She stated that "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."
The complaint, which also names junior health minister Yannick Neuder, has been lodged with the Republic’s Court of Justice, which handles cases against members of the government. A member of Vautrin’s team said she did not wish "to comment at this stage," and Borne was not immediately available for comment.