Sexual assault is a crime, rape a crime. A nuance which allows a medical student, twice convicted of sexual assault, to escape being banned from practicing. However, to be registered with the Order of Physicians, you must have a criminal record free of any crime.
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While healthcare unions and associations are calling to gather on Wednesday May 29 at 6 p.m. in front of the Ministry of Health to put an end to the silence that reigns over sexist and sexual violence in the medical world, a controversy has been stirring for several months the medical faculty of Limoges (Haute-Vienne). A medical student, twice convicted of sexual assault on former classmates, had been provisionally suspended by the Limoges University Hospital. But he was finally reinstated by decision of the administrative court last March. Reintegration judged “inadmissible”.
Associations fighting against sexist and sexual violence are asking that this student not be able to continue his university career and become an intern at the start of the next school year. To do this, Florie Sullerot, president of the autonomous national inter-union representative of general medicine interns, asked on Wednesday May 29 on franceinfo the Council of the Order of Physicians that the “sexual assaults are also recognized with a ban on exercising later”.
The case of this student is pending on a disciplinary commission launched last week by his university and on the opinion of the Council of the Order of Physicians, which has just issued a circular. In the latter, the Order of Physicians plans to prohibit the practice of medicine to any student convicted of crimes. Except that in this specific case, the student was convicted of misdemeanors. Florie Sullerot asks that “the Order of Physicians also takes the bull by the horns in terms of sexist and sexual violence and that sexual assaults also be recognized with a ban on practicing later.”
To be registered with the Order of Physicians, you must have a criminal record free of any crime.. “We cannot leave sexual assault aside”, she believes. Florie Sullerot does not accept that the medical student returns to the Limoges faculty. “We must protect all the people who will be at his side, whether they are caregivers, whether they are patients,” she insists.
“This is an individual who committed sexual assault, who has reoffended. There must be zero tolerance.”
Florie Sullerot, president of the autonomous national inter-union representative of general medicine internsat franceinfo
More broadly, it therefore proposes the immediate and systematic exclusion of any doctor or other professionals concerned by a report. It’s necessary “an extraction of the victim and that he be placed in a safe place”, she suggests. And “it is absolutely necessary to distance any perpetrator of violence from the interns for the duration of the investigation”, she adds.