Patron of Metz emergencies, ex-“health referent” of Emmanuel Macron during the presidential campaign, Dr. François Braun is bombarded at the Ministry of Health, where he will have to apply the proposals of the “flash mission” he has just hand over to the government.

We had left him on Friday, visiting the Samu de Pontoise (Val-d’Oise), erased behind Elisabeth Borne and a Brigitte Bourguignon on the start since her defeat in the legislative elections two weeks ago.

Suit and tie instead of the white coat, Dr. Braun learnedly listened to the Prime Minister affirming that the executive had retained “all the proposals” from the report he had presented to her the day before.

Nothing suggested his promotion to avenue Duquesne. “My mission is over, we’ll see who’s next,” he said the same evening on RTL. So here he is tasked with implementing his own report, and his 41 measures to overcome a “high risk” summer in the emergency room.

An unexpected consecration for this 59-year-old doctor, born in Belfort, trained in Nancy and seasoned in Verdun, where he practiced for nearly two decades before taking up the ranks at the regional hospital center (CHR) in Metz, as head of emergencies and Samu since 2009.

But “he was not very present on the ground”, affirms Patricia Schneider, local manager of the SUD-Santé union, who remembers having seen him “especially during the Covid period, when it was necessary to organize the transfers of patients and that there were cameras”.

His absence is also explained by his commitment to the Samu-Urgences de France (SUdF) association, of which he was the general secretary from 2001, then the president since 2014.

A national function, therefore more exposed, which allowed him to gain influence, until joining the team of candidate Macron as “health referent”, more in a role of spokesperson responsible for defending the program than of gray eminence holding the pen.

However, the practitioner knows how to become a tactician to push his pawns. As proof: by distributing a list of 120 emergency services in serious “difficulty” at the end of May, the day of the appointment of the first Borne government, Dr. Braun put the focus back on a hospital crisis that had passed into the background during the presidential one.

Immediately commissioned by the Head of State himself, he seized the opportunity to put on the table the idea of ​​generalized screening by the Samu, convinced that the systematic call to 15 can reduce the influx of patients, because “emergencies can no longer be open bar”.

A point of deep disagreement with his colleague Patrick Pelloux, emblematic president of the Association of emergency physicians of France (Amuf), who nevertheless praises the qualities of an “honest and courageous man”, endowed with a “very important” and an “intelligence to understand the political game very quickly”.

“I have known him for years (…) He arrived a few minutes after me at Charlie Hebdo after the attack, it solidified a friendship and a loyalty that I owe him”, he adds, while warning his colleague that he “will have to be the minister of everyone, not only of the networks that he has been able to set up”.

And to wonder: “How will the firefighters react”, which Dr. Braun “has always fought”. Behind the scenes or in broad daylight, as with this coup last October: around twenty ambulances from the Samu blocking the bridge opposite the National Assembly, to oppose the project of a “single number” for the emergency services , subject of recurring contention between leaders of the “whites” and “reds”.

The ancestry of the new minister, however, prepared him for the test of fire: his grandfather and his great-grandfather were military doctors, his father was chief medical officer of the fire department in the Territory of Belfort.

04/07/2022 12:55:24 –         Paris (AFP) –         © 2022 AFP