Cash Investigation investigation into Inovie, in Montpellier: “our patients have become our customers”

Union representatives came to meet Inovie management this Tuesday, March 5, in Montpellier. ML – Jean-Michel Mart

Following Cash Investigation's report on “Crisis Profiteers”, a meeting between union representatives and Inovie management took place this Tuesday March 5 at the group's headquarters in Montpellier. The opportunity to take stock with a nurse and union representative from a subsidiary of the group.

Since Thursday February 22 and the broadcast on France 2 of a report on Inovie, illustrating the profits made by medical analysis laboratories following the Covid-19 crisis , the employees of the group based in Montpellier are angry.

This Tuesday, March 5, elected officials and union delegates from the various Inovie subsidiaries participated, on their initiative, in a meeting with the group's management, at the Montpellier headquarters, located in Garosud.

“The Cash Investigation report highlighted the financial success of the company, but also the problems of working conditions and employee care,” explains Catherine Bellenoue, nurse and delegate CFDT Biofusion, one of the many subsidiaries of the Inovie group, mainly located in the great South, but also in the Paris region and in the French Overseas Territories. This Tuesday, March 5.

A report all the more poorly received as employees deplore a deterioration in their working conditions. "Our difficulties have accelerated because we don  #39;does not have sufficient staff. We go from one patient to another in three minutes. We do not take care of them and we do not support them as we should, and as we did before. The care has been depersonalized and dehumanized."

As an individual, Catherine Bellenoue no longer makes home visits as in the past. "Patients are therefore taken care of by liberal nurses, but they are not always available or do not necessarily have the time. We have patients who would benefit from coming to their homes and seeing them arrive in the laboratories. These are elderly people or those who have serious pathologies."

"I have been at Biofusion for twenty-five years (absorbed by Inovie in 2018). I took the time for the samples, we were interested in them. A person who told you they had cancer, we listened to them and we were interested in them. It's not that we don't do it anymore, but we do it keeping in mind that I have ten or fifteen people in the waiting room waiting for their sample. In this state of mind I cannot take care of the patient properly."

In this context, the enormous profits of the Inovie group are having difficulty passing through. “He would have more than enough to hire the number of people we need, that's obvious. We are talking about quantity when we are talking about quality. We want quality in our relationships with our patients, in our tools and our working conditions. They are in the quantity, the number of patients who pass through Inovie each day, the turnover, the profitability. We have become a work tool that must be profitable, and our patients have become customers."