The Minister of Health François Braun will launch, Monday, October 2 in Le Mans, consultations on health, carried out within the framework of the National Council for Refoundation. The president of the generalist union MG France, Agnès Giannotti, hopes on franceinfo “that it will be different from the Ségur de la Santé which had only given money to the hospital”. “There was no investment in the city,” she laments. Agnès Giannotti assures that cities also suffer from medical deserts and “that almost a third of doctors are approaching retirement age”.
franceinfo: What is your state of mind on the eve of the start of the consultation?
Agnes Giannotti: I hope it will be different from Ségur de la Santé, which had only given money to the hospital. There was no investment in the city. But there, the challenges facing us, such as a doctor for all, the attractiveness of the profession or prevention, involve money on the city.
I am worried because the ONDAM (National Health Insurance Spending Objective) in the Social Security financing bill is lower than inflation. If it stays like that, I’m afraid there’s no way. We really need ways to change things. There is a global shortage situation.
“Continuing to reason in a medical desert no longer makes sense. We can no longer imagine taking a doctor somewhere to put him elsewhere. We must first help the general practitioners who are in place not to leave.”
Agnès Giannotti, president of the MG France unionat franceinfo
We will therefore have to help general practitioners to work with collaborators, who are the medical assistants and nurses in the offices, so that we can be able to receive more patients.
Medical deserts don’t only concern the countryside, do you think?
I am in the 18th arrondissement of Paris and I am in a medical desert. We are in a global shortage because of the number of doctors that we have limited on purpose for too long. We pay for the poor management of this number of doctors and the doctors are aging since more than 30% are over 62 years old. A third of doctors are approaching retirement age. To avoid disaster, we really have to help young people and make them want to settle down, but above all help those who are in practice so that we can take care of more patients.
The rural mayors of France alerted on Friday to the situation in the countryside, where there is a shortage of 6,000 general practitioners. The government proposes to extend the general medicine internship by one year and encourage students to settle in the countryside. Do you think this is a good method?
It is a bad method to mix the two subjects. They must be set independently of each other. We will have to find 3,500 places to accommodate these young people per year, I don’t know where they are. Premises are also needed to receive these students and collaborators. We are waiting for local elected officials, who must also mobilize if we want to improve access to care.