#MeToo at the hospital: former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn recounts the harassment she suffered when she was a doctor
Almost a month after the revelations of Karine Lacombe, who accused emergency physician Patrick Pelloux of “sexual and moral harassment”, the word is still being released at the hospital. In the documentary Not so white blousesdirected by Marie Portolano and Grégoire Huet, broadcast on M6 on Sunday May 5, former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn also recounts having been the victim of moral and sexual harassment when she was a doctor. “It was so violent, such an exclusion. I was exhausted,” she confides in front of the camera.
This hematology specialist spent most of her career at Necker hospital in Paris. In 2003, she was 40 years old and was preparing to become a teacher. Faced with a commission composed exclusively of men, responsible for selecting future hospital executives, Agnès Buzyn remembers, at that moment, having “realized the anomaly”, A “serious dysfunction”. But the worst is yet to come.
Once a professor, she understands that this new status does not please all of her colleagues. Agnès Buzyn feels a “immense aggression” on their part, as if they “couldn’t stand having a woman hierarchically above them”. According to her, her new title made them “berserk”. She also says she was reduced to a “sexual fantasy” for four years. And give the example of this representative of doctors at the Necker hospital, who allegedly said behind his back: “It’s funny, every time I see her come into my office, I see her with a whip and boots.”
Faced with all this “violence” and this “shelving”Agnès Buzyn ends up returning the blouse. “I decided to leave my profession as a doctor”, she says. A radical decision, motivated in part by an instinct for survival. “I was pre-suicidal”she confides, adding that her children were also a reason for her not to take action.
The rest of her career, Agnès Buzyn spends it within public institutions linked to health and at nuclear. She was then promoted to Minister of Health in 2017, in the government of Edouard Philippe. A position that she will occupy until 2020, before the Covid-19 epidemic explodes in France.
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