Following a knife attack at the Reims hospital on Monday May 22, a nurse is between life and death, and a medical secretary was also injured, announced the Reims prosecutor’s office, specifying that the suspect was under enhanced curatorship.
The 37-year-old nurse and 56-year-old medical secretary “are still in extremely critical condition”, the health minister said Monday evening after a visit to the hospital. “One of them, released from the operating room, is currently in the recovery room. The other is still being cared for by multiple surgeons in the operating room,” he said.
The respondent, immediately arrested, “seems to have acted without apparent motive, especially since he did not have an appointment in this service”, according to a press release from the public prosecutor of Reims, Matthieu Bourrette. This man was taken into custody for attempted murder. The investigation was entrusted to the central police station in Reims.
The Minister of Health François Braun confirms the profile of the assailant “a 59-year-old man, from Reims, with a psychiatric history”.
The man “seems to be suffering from severe disorders and has been the subject of an enhanced curatorship for several years,” said the prosecutor. He had benefited in June 2022 from a dismissal “for criminal irresponsibility”, after having been “indicted in Châlons-en-Champagne for acts of aggravated violence”. “This case was soon to be referred to the investigating chamber of the Reims Court of Appeal to rule on the security measures likely to be taken,” he added.
A “committee” for “more safety for caregivers”
Also expressing his “deep emotion”, the mayor of Reims and president of the Fédération hospitalière de France (FHF), Arnaud Robinet, expressed on Twitter his “support for the hospital community”.
“Unfortunately, caregivers are increasingly targeted by acts of violence. 37% of health professionals say they have been victims of it in the last year. This violence in the health care setting, as in Reims, is absolutely intolerable ”, reacted the president of the FHP (Federation of private hospitalization), Lamine Gharbi.
The FHF stressed in a press release that “this attack” was part “in a more general context marked, in recent years, by several acts of physical or verbal violence in public hospitals”.
“I will convene a committee before the end of the week with all the stakeholders, the unions, the professionals” to “see what can be done to guarantee even more safety for caregivers”, promised François Braun during his press briefing at the hospital.
In September 2020, people in the emergency department of Robert-Debré Hospital in Paris were injured by a “clearly drunk” man and in January 2019, a patient assaulted three staff members in the emergency department of Saint-Debré Hospital. Anthony, in Paris.
The most serious attacks have taken place in mental institutions. In April 2002, a nurse at the psychiatric hospital in Bron (Rhône) was fatally stabbed by a 19-year-old man being treated for schizophrenia. In December 2004, a nurse and a caregiver at the psychiatric hospital in Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) were killed during their night on duty by a 21-year-old former patient, also suffering from schizophrenia.
