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In Charente-Maritime, a department affected by medical deserts, a young osteopath travels aboard a truck fitted out in the villages to treat the inhabitants. A traveling consultation to get as close as possible to patients faced with a lack of health professionals. #TheyHaveTheSolution
For the past few weeks, a strange turquoise truck has been crisscrossing the roads of Charente-Maritime. At the wheel, Agathe Tapon, 23, freshly graduated in osteopathy. The practitioner made the surprising choice to set up her business there. Since September, Agathe has been traveling every day to a rural town in the department to offer osteopathy consultations.
On board, it has everything necessary to properly welcome and handle patients, the same equipment as in a practice in town: a massage room, heating and water. The young osteopath took six months and invested 36,000 euros to transform her truck into a mobile practice to move closer to the inhabitants.
Agathe repairs the bodies in her osteo-truck by going to small villages that do not offer this type of care. It’s her own way of fighting against medical deserts. Because the young woman has long lived in the countryside. She too was confronted with the lack of health professionals in the villages: “I found it important to offer a local service to the inhabitants of the small towns of Charente-Maritime. And the truck is really the best. I can go where I want and when I want.”
Agathe makes her rounds five days a week and goes each day to a different village such as Eguille-sur-Seudre, north of Royan. This small town of 880 inhabitants has no general practitioner or physiotherapist. Only one nurse is present for the whole village. So the arrival of Agathe, one day a week aboard her osteo-truck, reassures this resident. “I find it great in the sense that we are already struggling a lot to have appointments in different offices which are overbooked. She organizes her tour according to us.”
Before settling in a practice in town, Agathe intends to continue her activity aboard her mobile truck for at least 7 years.