PARIS: Cash-strapped and running out of options, a public hospital in southwestern France has turned to an unlikely source of rescue: potential patients.

This week, the Basque Coast Hospital Centre (CHCB), in Bayonne, was the latest to appeal to the public to help fund urgent needs and purchase medicine, medical devices and vaccines through “citizen loans”.

Under the scheme, people lend money to public hospitals that later reimburse them, with interest.

The model has emerged in France over the past few years, with several hospitals and nursing homes inviting people to invest in their healthcare facilities.

The CHCB hopes to raise 1.5 million euros ($1.7m), the largest sum ever targeted by a French medical facility in such an operation.

Supporters see the loans as an ingenious way to reconnect hospitals with the people they serve.

But critics say such loans are a symptom of a healthcare system under severe strain, with hospitals forced to pass the hat around the community.

The loan “offers citizens the opportunity to participate directly in financing its cash flow needs related to essential healthcare purchases: medicine, medical devices, vaccines, and sampling equipment”, the Basque hospital said.

The hospital, which has several sites, notably in the towns of Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, said it had received institutional funding, but the payments were delayed, and it needed to fund its regular purchases.

A person can invest as little as one euro and will be reimbursed “at the end of 12 months” in a single payment, with interest set at 3.1 per cent, a rate that exceeds that of France’s popular Livret A savings account.

The operation is being carried out via Villyz, a government-approved platform.

‘Useful, transparent, local’

The Basque Coast hospital praises what it calls a “virtuous” financing model that “diversifies” its funding sources and lets people invest their savings in a product that is “useful, transparent and local”.

But it comes against a backdrop of tight finances. In 2024, the CHCB recorded a deficit of 21m euros on a budget of around 400m euros.

Across France, hospitals’ accounts are in the red: the system’s overall deficit reached an estimated 2.7 billion to 2.9 billion euros in 2024, according to official data.

Villyz began offering the scheme to hospitals last year.

It collects only “application fees that depend on the amount raised”, typically amounting to several thousand euros, said its president, Arthur Moraglia.

Through the scheme, a hospital in the northeastern town of Haguenau raised 100,000 euros to purchase new windows, and a hospital in Evreux, in the northwest, raised the same amount to add beds.

The Limoges University Hospital, which wants to open a women’s health centre dedicated to victims of domestic violence, with a total budget of 2.5 million euros, hopes to borrow one million from the public.

Some hospitals had already turned to more traditional fundraising, including Paris’s Georges Pompidou Hospital, which sought donations to buy a scanner.

Critics including the Force Ouvriere union have denounced what they call the government’s austerity policies undermining public hospitals nationwide.

“Whereas France once prided itself on having the best healthcare system in the world, today public hospitals are forced to hold out their hand to survive,” the union said last year.

Published in Dawn, February 14th, 2026