Irène Georgescu: There's no point in running if you want to go far

When asked to start at the beginning, Irène Georgescu is happy to point out that she spent her first four years at the UM, two in pharmacy and two in law. A frankness made all the easier by the fact that the university professor at Montpellier Management has nothing left to prove. In addition to her many responsibilities, including heading the UM's Social Sciences division and editing the Journal de gestion et d'économie en santé, she has just been awarded European funding Research Innovation Action funding of 5.6 million euros for the international Apollo project.

However, this preamble is not false modesty for a woman who is grateful to a university system that enabled her to " look for herself for a long time " and to start a thesis at the age of 32. The hesitations of her early years, between working in a chartered accountancy firm and teaching in a private post-bac company, ended with a straightforward university career. After completing her doctorate in three years, she was appointed lecturer and then passed the agrégation in Management Sciences, enabling her to become a professor in Nice. And in the process, she managed to return to Montpellier, a home port this Frenchwoman of Romanian origin had no intention of leaving behind.

Yield logic

As fate would have it, the management doctorate project she began in 2007 focused on the hospital environment, which this daughter of a family of doctors says she " did everything I could to counteract". At the time, France was in the midst of a reform of hospital activity-based pricing, and Irène Georgescu was looking at how the new evaluation tools were affecting healthcare professionals. And she notes their many dysfunctional effects: " Performance appraisals as they exist create role conflicts, stress and a loss of emotional involvement on the part of professionals in public hospitals, in the name of a logic of efficiency and financial performance...".

The hospital environment that caught up with her would remain her object of study. And as the researcher looks at the resilience of hospital staff, one crisis after another gives her food for thought: Covid, of course, with the lack of recognition shown by some of the professionals interviewed for the effort they put in, but also the effects of climate change, with its share of heatwaves and floods.

Networking and nerve

The European Apollo project embraces this issue of healthcare professionals' resilience, but on a different scale. An emotional Irène Georgescu is still savoring the pleasant surprise of being one of the four projects selected. Set up in just a few months, the project brings together eight universities and three hospitals, including the CHU of Montpellier and the CHU of Nîmes. When asked how she managed to do it so quickly, she says that it took " networking, a few bottles in the sea and a bit of nerve " to secure a partnership with Harvard's Massachussetts General Hospital. But probably also a lot of overtime. " You really do work a lot," admits the woman who also holds teaching responsibilities for nine different degrees. " And that goes for my whole team," she adds, clearly delighted with the quality of her professional relationships.

These are human values that she would like to inject into the performance indicators imposed on hospitals, " where the current tools propose a volume-based approach and only partially reflect the work of healthcare professionals, which is difficult to evaluate. As a doctor once said to me, 'we're not here to sell washing powder and bolts, we're here for the patients'".

And what better way to make new proposals than to collaborate and visit a prestigious IVY League university . Irène Georgescu knows that the bet is not yet won, but hopes to be able to put forward her ideas.