Philippe Besset, the president of the FSPF, calls on the government to better orient health students towards courses that lack candidates.
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“10% of the workforce is missing” and “we are able to recruit 15,000 pharmacists”, says Sunday, October 23 on franceinfo Philippe Besset, president of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Unions of France (FSPF). According to Philippe Besset, if the sector lacks hands, it is because of the “public health missions” additional resources that have been entrusted to pharmacies, such as “vaccination and screening”. “It takes 10 minutes more per act, with hundreds of thousands more acts per week”he explains.
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Dispensaries are particularly struggling to recruit employees, pharmacy technicians who “come to support the teams of incumbent pharmacists”. “You have to find young people”, launches Philippe Besset. The president of the FSPF believes that this “problematic will last one or two years”the training time. “The training centers for pharmacy assistants are full, so I hope that next year we can increase the pace and train more young people”he adds.
Philippe Besset thus salutes “the apprenticeship bonus and incentive” who are, according to him “significant help” to encourage students to settle in rural areas.
At the start of the 2022 academic year, 1,100 places were vacant on university benches in the pharmacy sector. A “disaster”, deplores Philippe Besset. He assures us that this difficulty is directly “linked to a very poor application of the PASS/LAS reform” (reform of health studies). The president of the Federation of Pharmaceutical Unions of France accuses the Ministry of Health of having “focused on the reform of the training of doctors” and to have “Completely forgotten the associated sectors such as midwife and pharmacist who have extreme difficulty explaining that it is the same initial examination that makes it possible to become a doctor, pharmacist or midwife”.
For Philippe Besset, it is “essentially a question of communication with young people” : “Young people think they are doing a first year of medicine and do not know that they are possibly doing a first year of pharmacy or midwifery at the same time”, he explains. He recommends “to explain [aux étudiants] at the time of Parcoursup, then during the first year, so that they move towards its sectors which are in demand”.