“Talking about health in the presidential campaign is a very soapy board”, explains Bruno Hammel, Deputy Secretary General of the Order of Physicians in the Dordogne and general practitioner in Marsac-sur-l’Isle, guest of France Bleu Périgord on Thursday March 24. This is a special health day on France Bleu, 17 days before the first round of the presidential election. “I think this is a major concern of voters and candidates, except that the latter do not dare to talk about it. It is complicated to propose health laws without obtaining an immediate outcry, either from the profession either patients.”
Young people don’t want to go and bury themselves. – Bruno Hammel, Deputy Secretary General of the Order of Physicians in the Dordogne
In the Dordogne, the health issue mainly covers medical deserts. A term repudiated by Bruno Hammel. “There are no medical deserts”he assures. “There are simply deserts. The Republic has abandoned rurality for decades and today, the absence of doctors in a small village also corresponds to the absence of many other things.” The Deputy Secretary General of the College of Physicians in the Dordogne believes that the current system does not attract young people.“They arrived with the 35 hours and want to enter a wage system. So, on leaving university, when they are offered to enter a wage system managed by hospitals in large cities or to settle in a countryside where there is no job for the spouse and no school for the children, the choice is quickly made.
Forcing young doctors, “it’s a failure”
To encourage young doctors to settle in medical deserts, several presidential candidates, such as Fabien Roussel, Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Yannick Jadot, want go further in incitement. “It’s been done for decades and it doesn’t work”replies Bruno Hammel. “Today, the question arises as to whether we can force them to be entrepreneurs. Can we put them on the payroll in desertified places? Sometimes it works, like in Saint-Médard-de-Mussidan , where a center with four salaried doctors opened a few months ago. Don’t tell me it’s not possible!”
But force them, Marsac’s doctor doesn’t believe it. “All the countries that created this system came back from it, Canada forced doctors leaving college to go and settle in the medical deserts for a while. They came back and it was a failure”laments Bruno Hammel. “Our young people no longer want to invest 60 or 70 hours a week. Today we are talking about an emergency but it has been 22 years since I was elected to the Council of the Order and people say that we are going straight the wall. So I think that the only urgency is to offer them a nomadic and salaried system in desertified places and to ask them if they are ready to go there.”