Chirac Calls for Improved Security After Nurses Killed

President Jacques Chirac called for "wholesale changes" in France's mental health sector yesterday as hospitals throughout the country held a minute's silence in memory of two nurses hacked to death at a psychiatric unit at the weekend.

Amid concern about cuts in France's health service, hospital psychiatrists said mental health institutions were facing acute shortages of beds and staff.

"There has to be more coordination, more surveillance of patients and more security in psychiatric units. It is now a major priority," Mr Chirac said.

Acknowledging the "grave difficulties" facing the sector, Philippe Douste-Blazy, the health minister, said no further psychiatric beds would be closed, an extra €200m (£137m) would be made available and a review of psychiatric care would be published "within weeks".

To calm staff's safety fears, he also announced, as an immediate measure, that all psychiatric units could be fitted with a panic button linking them to their nearest police station.

The bodies of Chantal Klimaszewski, 48, and Lucette Gariod, 40, were found early on Saturday morning in a psychiatric wing of the Pyrénées hospital complex in the southwestern town of Pau.

One had been decapitated and the other's throat had been slit, apparently with a sword.

Yesterday, a sixth potential suspect was arrested and released police said, after five men arrested early on Saturday had also been released.

"The inquiry is advancing satisfactorily," the spokesman said, adding that police were focusing on the theory that the killer or killers "... have some kind of grudge - maybe indicating a discharged patient".

The hospital's 1,200 staff demanded police protection until the murderer was arrested and permanent security improvements put in place: a plea echoed by hospital staff around the country who face an increase in the number of violent incidents.

"Doctors and nurses are insulted or physically assaulted daily in almost every hospital in France," said Paul Bonnan, a consultant psychiatrist at the Cadillac hospital near Bordeaux. "Very few institutions have anything resembling a proper professional security service. Most of the time just about anyone can wander in."

Healthcare unions said the number of qualified psychiatrists in France would fall from 13,000 at the beginning of the decade to 8,000 by 2020. The CGT union said up to 800 posts in hospital psychiatric units were vacant.

Bed closures - the Pau psychiatric wing has 460 beds compared with 700 a decade ago - also meant increasing numbers of patients were being discharged, sometimes after just three days, as soon as the worst of their immediate crisis was over.