Health Minister François Braun is back in Moselle this Friday, September 16. A trip, accompanied by the Minister of Sports Amelie Oueda-Castera, mainly focused on sports health. The ministers will notably go to a dialysis center in Talange to meet patients who benefit from a sports-health programme. The former head of emergencies at CHR Metz-Thionville and his colleague from the government will also inaugurate Académos, a health sports center in Verny.
France Bleu Lorraine: François Braun, how is France in terms of health sports?
Francois Brown: France is not the best student in terms of prevention. In general, and in terms of physical activity and sport, we are far from our colleagues in northern Europe. This is the whole objective that we are pursuing, with Amélie Oueda-Castera, to make healthy sport one of the major challenges of prevention in the years to come. We know perfectly well that sport is very effective in the prevention, whether it is primary prevention, that is to say not to get sick, to feel good. But also secondary and tertiary prevention, ie when you have a chronic disease. So, it really is a medicine in its own right.
The Health Plan 2022 had projected 500 sports and health centers at the national level. We will reach it at the end of the year. We must now go further.
You are going to launch the health component of the National Council for Refoundation wanted by Emmanuel Macron. What will it contain?
Above all, it means giving a voice to the field: health professionals, fellow citizens, elected officials. I will launch this major consultation at the very beginning of October with the meetings that will be organized at the local level. I hope there will be many in Moselle because if the problems are at the local level for our fellow citizens, in particular access to care, the solutions, we will also find them at the local level. So access to care will of course be one of the main axes of this health section of the National Refoundation Council, but also prevention and the attractiveness of professions.
Access to care, precisely, is one of the major projects of your beginnings at the Ministry of Health. Your first act was the ER flash mission at the start of the summer. Has it borne fruit?
We are almost at the end of September and we can now say that the results are quite positive. What we feared, the collapse of our system during this summer, did not happen. This is a very good thing thanks to the involvement of professionals. Whether it’s in the hospital, whether it’s our general practitioner colleagues and other health professionals in town. So yes, we can be and we must be satisfied with these first steps.
These are measures that were there to get us through the summer. Now, we must undertake the overhaul of our entire health system.
Emergency services, such as at CHR Metz Thionville, still had to limit their access to nights and weekends…
Limiting activity is above all regulate this activity at the level of the emergency services. This means advising our fellow citizens to call 15. Better orientation does not mean less good treatment. Especially in a region like Metz and its surroundings. We have an organization of general practitioners to respond precisely to this unscheduled care. It’s rethinking our system a bit. Because when you have angina or you have had pain in your knee for three weeks, the solution is certainly not emergencies, it is rather to go see a general practitioner.
How to solve the double problem in Moselle of the lack of medical staff and the flight to Luxembourg?
There is never, unfortunately a solution to solve everything. But there is a range of solutions. This is the whole principle that I developed this summer in the concept of the toolbox: different solutions that adapt to each territory. The cross-border problem is a problem which of course affects the Moselle in other departments.
What is needed is to make health professionals want to settle with us. It is to give them good working conditions.
We know it, the working conditions in the hospital are currently very difficult, especially post-Covid. First, you have to improve your working conditions. Financial competition from Luxembourg, we must necessarily talk about it, but it is something that should not be considered as the only problem. How can health professionals trained in Moselle stay with us? It also involves facilities, probably housing, getting around.
Are we in an 8th wave of Covid-19?
The indicators are starting to change. We are not yet in a major acceleration. But the famous R which says how many people are infected by a sick person was at 0.9 a week ago. Now we are a little above 1%. These indicators, I monitor them very very closely every day. The Grand-Est region is the region where the incidence rate and the reproduction rate are a little higher than the rest of France. Now we are below 200 contaminations per 100,000 inhabitants.
We are still in low numbers, but we are monitoring this like milk on fire.