Irène Georgescu: There’s no point in rushing to get far

When asked to start from the beginning, Irène Georgescu playfully recalls that she spent her first four years at theUM —two in pharmacy and two in law. This candor comes all the more easily since the professor at Montpellier Management has nothing left to prove. In addition to her many responsibilities—including heading the Social Sciences division at theUM and serving as editor-in-chief of the Journal de gestion et d’économie en santé—she has just secured European funding Research Innovation Action grant of 5.6 million euros for the international Apollo project.

This preamble, however, is not false modesty on the part of someone who expresses her gratitude to an academic system that allowed her to“search for herself for a long time” and begin a dissertation at age 32. Her hesitations in the early years—between working at an accounting firm and teaching at a private post-high-school institution—ultimately led to a straight path toward an academic career. With her doctorate in hand after just three years, she landed a position as a lecturer in quick succession, then earned her agrégation in Management Sciences, allowing her to become a professor in Nice. And shortly thereafter, she managed to return to Montpellier, a home base that this Frenchwoman of Romanian origin had no intention of leaving behind.

Yield Logic

In a twist of fate, the doctoral project in management she began in 2007 focused on the hospital setting—a field that this daughter of a family of doctors saysshe “did everything to avoid.” At the time, France was in the midst of reforming its hospital activity-based pricing system, and Irène Georgescu examined how the new evaluation tools were affecting healthcare professionals. And she observed their many dysfunctional effects:“Performance evaluations as they currently exist create role conflicts, stress, and a loss of emotional commitment among professionals in public hospitals, all in the name of efficiency and financial performance…”

This hospital setting, which has become a central focus of her work, will remain the subject of her research. And while the researcher is interested in the resilience of hospital staff, the succession of crises gives her food for thought: COVID-19, of course, along with the lack of recognition expressed by some of the professionals interviewed regarding the efforts they made, but also the effects of climate change, with its share of heat waves and floods.

Networking and Guts

The European Apollo project addresses this issue of healthcare professionals’ resilience but on a different scale. Irène Georgescu, visibly moved, is still savoring the pleasant surprise of being among the four selected projects. Put together in just a few months, the project brings together eight universities and three university hospitals, including the Montpellier University Hospital and the Nîmes University Hospital. When asked how she managed to do it so quickly, she replies,“Networking, putting out feelers, and a little nerve”—which she needed to secure a partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated hospital. But it also likely involved a lot of overtime.“We really work a lot,” admits the professor, who also holds teaching responsibilities across nine different degree programs.“And that’s true for my entire team,” she adds, clearly delighted with the quality of her professional relationships.

She would like to incorporate these human values into the performance metrics imposed on hospitals,“where current tools take a volume-based approach and only partially reflect the work of healthcare professionals, which is difficult to evaluate. As a doctor once told me, ‘We’re not here to sell laundry detergent and bolts—we’re here for the patients.’”

And what better way to develop new proposals than through a collaboration and a visiting fellowship at a prestigious Ivy League university ? Irène Georgescu knows the challenge isn’t over yet, but she hopes to be able to advance her ideas.