Estournet (Brigitte)

Head of the Paediatrics Ward at Raymond-Poincaré hospital in Garches, a suburb west of Paris / Meeting with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Donation to open a sensory stimulation room for patients with disabilities and limited mobility, and to buy DVD players, computers and screens for bedrooms (16 December 2009).

“When you’re a doctor or a nurse here, either you leave as soon as you can because it’s too much to take, or you just never leave.” Brigitte Estournet first stepped into the Paediatrics Ward in Garches Hospital 30 years ago. This ward specialises in treating illnesses entailing muscle degeneration and orphan diseases. And she never left. This passionate, determined and devoted woman managed to find a balance between her family life and a job that often takes self-sacrifice. Professor Estournet watches over 80 children a year in her ward (Garches is the only hospital in France that provides intensive care and rehabilitation under the same roof, i.e. the only one that can provide care for the more fragile patients). They are 1 month to 20 months old, and most of them have neurological and/or respiratory diseases. In her words, “The problem that our patients face is that they are very costly and burdensome for society. For a patient who is completely paralysed and in need of an artificial respirator, it takes four people just to wash him. There’s the lifting, the undressing, the holding, the putting the clothes back on and so on. It takes an hour. (…) The question is this: will we be able to keep treating these patients with this level of care ten years from now? It is a choice for society.” Brigitte Estournet can take two hours out of her busy schedule to tell a family about the causes of a disease. And she is striving to continue to make her patients’ lives better (their life expectancy has lengthened over the past 30 years), to treat them to what she considers the “essential extras” such as a school is the hospital and outings that will ease the feeling of exclusion. “Every little helps,” she says. She welcomes help from everywhere, adding, inter alia, that she has “always objected to TV rental schemes in hospitals,” because, she explains, “It’s social discrimination: what are the children supposed to do if their parents can’t afford it? I think it’s ridiculous that hospitals can’t provide things like that.” Professeur Estournet has been waiting for a new building to house her ward, with showers for disabled patients, for 12 years. And she has never lost hope.