the patients concerned “will be contacted in the coming days”, explains the CNAM for which this file is a “priority”

“All chronic patients who do not have attending physicians will be contacted in the coming days”, explains Monday, April 10 on franceinfo Marguerite Cazeneuve, deputy director of the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) while 700,000 chronically ill people begin from Monday to receive an email or letter from health insurance. This system, first tested in the Val-de-Marne, should be generalized in the coming weeks. A “priority” for health insurance because if nothing is done, “we will be at 800,000” chronic patients without attending physician “by the end of the year”.

franceinfo: So it is the Val-de-Marne experience that is set to become widespread?

Marguerite Cazeneuve: We begin to generalize it. All chronic patients who have no attending physicians will therefore be contacted in the coming days. We will look for patients and we will look for doctors and we will try to find solutions on a case-by-case basis for the entire population by the end of the year. All the departments will therefore be mobilized. It’s true that we have more than 700,000 chronic patients today without a doctor. If we do nothing, we will be at 800,000 by the end of the year, so it is urgent to reverse the trend.

Isn’t it a question of forcing doctors to take on new patients?

The action is based on volunteering: the free choice of the patient (some will refuse) and the free choice of doctors (who are not obliged to respond to this call) and who – for some – already have patients full to bursting. It is a more structural problem that we are trying to solve: how do we save medical time (reduce administrative costs for doctors, for example) while making general medicine more attractive to younger generations? For this we also have the objective of having at least 10,000 doctors with a medical assistant by 2025.

How do we arrive at these 700,000 patients without an attending physician?

When we look at the glass half full, we see that 95% of chronically ill people have an attending physician. So only 5% don’t. But yes it is an emergency, in a context where we have more and more elderly patients and fewer and fewer doctors. This therefore presupposes a collective organization and a general mobilization.

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Why is this important? Why do these patients absolutely have to find a treating doctor?

In general, the objective is for all patients in France to be able to have a general practitioner, but in fact chronic patients are the patients for whom it is most important, in particular those with cardiovascular diseases, diabetics, those who have long-term psychiatric conditions, or people with cancer. For these patients, continuous follow-up is necessary. When they find themselves without a doctor, there is an immediate deterioration in their care. This is therefore the reason why it is the priority of health insurance today.