a young general practitioner embarks on a “tour de France of medical deserts”

Anaïs Werestchack, general practitioner, began with her companion a “tour of France of medical deserts” in order to provide replacements in rural areas often neglected by young doctors. This doctor describes patients often suffering from several pathologies and without access to medicine.

The probability was low that a young doctor would agree to come in January as a replacement to Grand-Serre, 900 inhabitants, in the heart of the Drôme des Collines, to replace a general practitioner who had gone on vacation for a few weeks. And yet, Anaïs Werestchack applied. “I am originally from Auvergne, I have a large part of my family in Corrèze, in Limousin, where the situation is truly catastrophic so obviously we are sensitive to this issue of medical deserts”she explains.

A third of French people live in a medical desert. Areas, in town or in the countryside, are neglected by young doctors because the exercise there is grueling as the number of patients to be treated is colossal. However, a handful of young doctors still agree to come and work in these deserts. LikeAnaïs Werestchack, general practitioner who decided to embark with his companion on a “tour of France of medical deserts”. Together they carry out occasional replacements in the countryside, in a militant approach.

“I’ve seen things I’ve never seen before, patients who are out of treatment because they can’t get an appointment.”

Anaïs Werestchack, general practitioner

at franceinfo

Anaïs Werestchack continues consultations and sees between 25 and 30 patients per day. The working day in a medical desert is grueling. The young woman says she sees in her office “hypertensive patients who arrive at the office with very high blood pressure”. “It’s not ‘bobology’, it’s real medicine.”she emphasizes.

“I have already done replacements in town, I saw patients every day who came because they had a runny nose, a pain here or there. I tell myself that having done nine years of studies to give Doliprane or tell them to wash their noses, it’s not very interesting and it’s very redundant. Here it’s really polypathologies, recourse to specialists is more difficult so there are also a lot of things to do, it’s very enriching”continues the doctor.

“Luckily there are people like that who get around!”

Onofrio, a patient

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Patients like Onofrio are grateful. “It’s very hard to find a doctor. They are saturated”he laments. Anaïs Werestchack could have chosen a quieter daily life. Doctor’s work is everywhere. But this blonde with the physique of a model, who was also elected Miss Auvergne two years ago, prefers “to wander” as she says, aboard her van, for this “tour de France of medical deserts”, with her companion, Brice Philippon, physiotherapist.

He also performs a replacement in a nearby office. “We have to refuse certain patients, tell them that their schedules are full”, he says. The goal: to relieve a fellow physiotherapist so that she can take a vacation. “Or she continues to work, work, pull a little on the rope, even if it means burning out by giving too much of herself for her patients”justifies Brice Philippon.

Next steps for the couple, a small village in Haute-Savoie, then Burgundy Franche-Comté, Alsace and the North.