| Summary: | Are emergency rooms in crisis ? Recent events, a national strike and a pandemic, seem to confirm this. Therefore, it seems undeniable that the emergency rooms have been undermined in recent years. But the theme of the crisis seems older. Emergency room overcrowding on the one hand, and patient violence on the other hand, have gradually become public problems and point to a crisis that is more structural than cyclical. Two institutional measures are recommended at the national level in order to combat violence and relieve congestion in emergency departments: increasing security on the one hand and humanizing on the other. Through a longitudinal ethnographic study in an emergency department of a non-university hospital in a medium-sized town in northern France, we analyze how these measures have been implemented in the field. Focusing on the restructuring of the reception of an emergency department, this article shows that although the problem of overcrowding in the emergency department seems to have been resolved, violence has not completely disappeared and has gradually turned into suffering at work.
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