The recent health crisis, due to Covid 19, has brought to light a reality that has been decried for decades (Evin, 2009; Juven, Pierru, Vincent 2019) concerning the shortage of hospital staff and the inadequacy of equipment (masks, vaccines, beds, drugs, respirators, etc.). This shortage of professionals is partly made up for by the hiring of foreign-educated care workers with precarious contracts and lower pay than those of their French-educated colleagues. Do these staff face discrimination, dequalification processes and career inequalities? What are the differences in career paths between these staff and colleagues with French diplomas? Is the derogatory system, which is widely used in the various hospital departments, a way for administrators to reduce or control expenditure? But what are the effects of this system on their career paths, and also on the perception that these staff have of their own future within the French public hospital? What are the wishes of these professionals in the wake of the ongoing health crisis (requests for training, bifurcations or even leaving the profession)? And how do these individual paths fit into and inform us about the evolution of French public health policies in recent decades? These are the questions I will try to answer.