Are there 27 million consultations not honored each year in France?

The Minister of Health and Labor, Catherine Vautrin, affirms that each year in France, “6 to 10% of consultations are not honored” and this represents “27 million consultations”. Except that there is no exhaustive quantitative study on the subject.

It’s been over a year since we heard about a “rabbit tax” aimed at patients who, without warning, do not go to their doctor’s appointment, thus throwing them “a rabbit hole”. During his general policy speech, the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, spoke about it again, affirming that the government wishes to implement this tax.

Guest of RTL, Sunday February 18, the Minister of Labor, Health and Solidarity, Catherine Vautrin, confirms that she is working on the implementation of this “rabbit tax” in the face of the findings and the figures, because according to her “there are 6 to 10% of consultations which are not honored and that is 27 million who are not honored” overall. Even if this figure exists, it is not based on an official study with robust and exhaustive results.

“27 million consultations” lost?

These figures, put forward by Catherine Vautrin, come from a study carried out in 2022 by the regional union of health professionals (URPS) of Île-de-France. This study is based on a questionnaire sent by e-mail to 16,000 private doctors in the region. 2,000 answered the questions. What emerges is that 95% of them record at least one unfulfilled appointment every day and 43% estimate that this represents 5% of their consultations.

These results were then multiplied by the number of private doctors in France and by the number of days worked, to ultimately arrive at “27 million consultations that are not honored“. The URPS recognizes that there is no “scientific accuracy“concerning these figures”extrapolated to the national scale.

Another study focused on general practitioners only

A survey by MG France was also carried out last year and they have just published the results. It was carried out specifically on general practitioners. 1,000 were surveyed and they recorded an average of 2.5 unfulfilled appointments per week.

From these figures, MG France also carried out an extrapolation to all general practitioners over one year. Overall, this represents, according to their calculations, 6.5 million missed appointments out of the 251 million annual appointments made by general practitioners.

In the end, we do not have an official and exhaustive study which gives a robust figure of the number of appointments not honored by patients, without warning.

The dentists most affected by this phenomenon on the Doctolib platform

THE leader in online medical appointment booking, Doctolib carried out a survey on these unfulfilled appointments using data from its platform. It turns out that it is dentists who suffer the most from unfulfilled appointments, this represents 6.2% of their consultations. Next come specialists with 4.5% of their consultations. General practitioners and pediatricians, on Doctolib, have 3.4% of their consultations not honored.