the blues of general practitioners, more and more of them are abandoning the profession

Thousands of general practitioners change jobs every year due to lack of reasonable working conditions.

While there is a severe shortage of general practitioners, some choose to give up. Every year, thousands of people close their offices to change careers. The reason for this is the numerous difficulties encountered: too many patients, too much paperwork, too much pressure… The phenomenon affects all age groups, particularly young doctors.

Julie had an “express” career as a general practitioner: one year replacing her colleagues, one year running her practice in a medium-sized town. And then the thirty-year-old broke down: she didn’t have enough time, a series of patients, too much paperwork to manage, and not enough resources, specialists and hospital beds to take care of her patients: “I considered for several weeks stopping medicine completely. I think I could have gone into baking or something else, perhaps into more manual work.”

“Respect my values ​​and not mistreat patients”

This young doctor ended up going out of business but she is not giving up medicine, since Julie now works as an employee, providing home hospitalization. A turn that was not easy to take: “I ended this exercise to respect my values ​​and not mistreat patients. I chose a specialty, in any case a hospital department, where we still take care of people, we take time with patients and we bring a real plus to these people. I still wanted to give myself the chance to try another practice before saying stop to medicine.”

Saying stop to medicine because the exercise has become too difficult is a fairly recent phenomenon which mainly affects general practitioners. This is what Doctor Jean-Marcel Mourgues, vice-president of the National Council of the Order of Physicians, observes, who is responsible for analyzing medical demography. “This is relatively new data but which takes on its full importance given the shortage of medical supplies. There is indeed a problem, or there is pressure on the ‘productivity’ of the attending physician, which is antagonistic with the quality of care and the deep wishes of doctors, he notes. They want to allocate more time to patients who have become more complex since the population is inexorably aging at the same time.” In 2023, 5,400 doctors will stop practicing. More than half of these dropouts were general practitioners.

“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t do it”

The vast majority of these doctors who drop out remain in the healthcare field. Anne-Sophie Minkiewicz is a former nurse converted to coaching. She set up a company, “Med reconversion”, to help these caregivers change careers. In one year, she has already supported around a hundred doctors: “Doctors remain in ‘care’ in 80% of cases, therefore in taking care. Yes, we have a few doctors who do radically different things but that’s not the majority. The vast majority question themselves and say : ‘How can I continue to care for others?’ These are doctors who will sometimes decide to take a break. Others will go part-time and do a graphic design or draftsman job, others will set up a surf school. There are some who will go into medical journalism , others who will go and teach…”

Dropout doctors also turn to training, or to other medical specialties, such as much more lucrative aesthetic medicine. They are increasingly abandoning general medicine.

The Council of the Order of Physicians estimated, in 2019, that between 5 and 10% of medical students abandoned their medical studies midway, more than in any other course. If we listen to François Vilain, from the ISNAR IMG interns’ union, the phenomenon is quite widespread: “All the interns know people around them who have left their medical studies. We thought about it around a table with friends. We asked ourselves the question of whether this had to be done again. There were ten of us and everyone said: ‘If I had to do it again I wouldn’t do it, it’s too much sacrifice.’ Too many sacrifices and life time.”

“The law normally is a maximum of 48 hours per week. Most interns work more than 50 hours. The job is very hard and the conditions in which it is carried out are very degraded.”

François Vilain, from the ISNAR IMG interns union

franceinfo

And if they do not drop out during their studies, when choosing their specialty, the interns abandon general medicine which nevertheless represents almost half of the places at the end of the course. In 2023, of the first 500 in the competition, there were only 20 who chose to be a general practitioner.