Some firefighters in Perpignan, a city in southern France, are sometimes forced to wait for hours at the doors of the local hospital's emergency department while still caring for the patient they have brought in, French broadcaster TF1info reported on September 12, 2026.
The broadcaster said the delays are caused by a glaring shortage of staff at the hospital, which slows down the handover of patients to emergency room teams.
The time lost waiting at the hospital doors keeps the firefighters from responding to other emergency calls elsewhere in the region, according to the report.
Firefighters' role in emergency response
In France, firefighters routinely act as first responders, transporting sick and injured people to hospital emergency departments as part of the national emergency medical system. They work alongside ambulance crews and the SAMU, the country's emergency medical dispatch and coordination service. Every hour a fire crew spends waiting at a hospital door is an hour it cannot spend answering a new call.
Crews cannot normally leave a hospital until a member of staff formally takes charge of a patient, a step known as the handover. When emergency departments are short-staffed, that handover can take far longer than usual, leaving ambulance and fire crews stuck outside instead of back on the road.
Regional health agency response
The Agence régionale de santé, or ARS, is the public body responsible for organising hospital staffing, funding and health policy within each of France's regions, including Occitanie, where Perpignan is located. The agency has already increased staffing levels at the Perpignan hospital, TF1info reported.
But firefighters told the broadcaster that the extra staff has not been enough to solve the problem. They described the agency's measure as ineffective, saying they want a different, faster solution instead.
What firefighters want
Instead, firefighters want the hospital to set up what is known in France as a "poste médical avancé," an advanced medical post designed to triage patients more quickly as soon as they arrive. Such posts are typically set up at the scene of accidents or mass-casualty incidents so that medical staff can sort patients quickly according to the severity of their condition.
A related report on the TF1info website said patients at Perpignan's emergency department have had to wait more than two hours on stretchers at the hospital's doors.
Staffing pressures in hospital emergency departments have been a widely reported problem in France in recent years, with hospitals citing rising demand and difficulty recruiting doctors and nurses.
The report was broadcast as part of the Saturday evening edition of TF1's flagship news bulletin, the JT 20h. Perpignan lies in the Occitanie region of southern France, near the Mediterranean coast and the border with Spain.
