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For Foreigners on France's Front Line, COVID-19 Exposes Health Care
Shortcomings

Lisa Bryant

   PARIS - Like many of their colleagues these days, Dr. Nefissa Lakhdara
   and her husband, Dr. Redouane Bouhalila, return home from long hours on
   the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. They wash up, stuff potentially
   virus-tainted clothes into the washing machine, and attend to children
   left homebound by the pandemic, clocking up exhausting work weeks.

   It's a routine without a fixed ending, as France battles a disease that
   has killed more than 23,000 people. But while the spouses, both medical
   doctors trained in Algeria, face the same health risks as their French
   colleagues, there is far less payback.

   "We love our job and we love our patients," says Lakhdara, who works as
   an obstetrician-gynecologist at a hospital outside Paris. "But the
   system is wrong, and we're trying to get it right."

   She is hardly alone in voicing such sentiments. Even as the pandemic
   sees the nation rallying around overtaxed health workers--with
   locked-down French cheering them from windows every night -- it is also
   exposing longstanding shortcomings in France's health care system,
   along with simmering grievances.

   That includes those harbored by thousands of non-European-trained
   health professionals working here. Sometimes known by their acronym
   PADHUE, they often earn less, have less security and rise through the
   ranks more slowly than their European Union counterparts.

   Now, the coronavirus is powering a backlash against such inequalities.

   In an open letter earlier this month to Prime Minister Edouard
   Philippe, a dozen of France's medical leaders, including former Health
   Minister Bernard Kouchner, called for the estimated 4,000-5,000 non-EU
   doctors working in French hospitals to be "fully integrated" into the
   country's health system.

   Without them, "we would be totally disarmed" in fighting the crisis,
   they wrote in a petition that has garnered more than 40,000 signatures.

   According to a union fighting for PADHUE rights, the first doctor to
   die of the coronavirus in France was a 67-year-old emergency room
   physician from Madagascar.

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