The report of the National Council of the Order of Physicians is overwhelming. In 2021, its security observatory recorded 1,009 attacks, around fifty more than in 2020, not counting those that are not reported. Isere is no exception, it is even one of the ten French departments which reports the most attacks on doctors according to the order of the department.
Whether the majority of reported attacks are verbal, they are no less violent. Doctor André-Michel Guillemaud has worked for SOS Médecins for 30 years. A little over a month ago in Grenoble, at the start of the summer of 2022, he suffered the wrath of a patient suffering from psychiatric disorders whom he had already seen a few weeks earlier. Probably drunk that night, “He didn’t want a medical answer, he came to tell me he was very bad.”
A patient threatens him with a knife
The man sits in the consulting room and tells her “I’m very, very bad and I’m going to kill someone. It might be you, it might be me, it might be Macron, it might be my daughter, I’ll kill someone.” André-Michel Guillemaud cannot find an answer, the patient ends up pull out a knife and threaten him. He turns the office around and prevents the doctor from leaving. “This gentleman was in such bad shape that I thought he was going to do something serious and I said to myself that I could die. Really I had this feeling that day that if I did not find a solution he could do something serious, either kill himself in front of me or kill me.”
After half an hour, André-Michel Guillemaud manages to alert his colleague. The patient comes out of the office and destroys the other doctor’s car. “I was unable to go to work, my colleague no longer had a vehicle. We had to go on a visit, we closed SOS for that night.” They both complained like their secretary who suffered verbal abuse from the patient. Shocked, she was arrested for several days for an accident at work.
Health system crisis fuels tensions
For Doctor Guillemaud, the difficulty in finding appointments creates tensions. “What we feel is the anxiety of patients who sometimes raise their voices and say ‘I absolutely must be treated’ because they have the impression that they are not going to find a doctor. and place, people don’t understand.”
This lack of doctors puts people in stress
He feels increasing anxiety about access to care, “this lack of doctors puts people under stress” which is partly under “policy failure.” When he started his medical studies “40 years ago, I was told that I would be unemployed because there were too many doctors! It is the policy that is completely flawed and that has not been able to predict medical demography.”
Psychiatric disorders do not help the situation, many more people suffer from it according to this doctor and are not not supported for lack of psychiatrists.