Mouna is Tunisian, Jafar is Algerian: they come out of 24 hour duty in the emergency room of Montfermeil hospital (Seine-Saint-Denis). “Our intern, who was on call with us, also comes from Tunisiaexplains Jafar. So the three of us were there to handle the emergencies that night.” Mouna adds: “The on-call resuscitator was a Tunisian, and the radiologist is Tunisian too!”
In early June, Doctor François Braun, president of Samu-Urgences de France, was charged by Emmanuel Macron and Elisabeth Borne with a flash mission: to write a report on the crisis situation in hospital emergencies. The conclusions, submitted on Thursday June 30, offered several ideas for successfully getting through the summer. Among them, a solution to overcome the shortage of doctors: stabilize the administrative situation of foreign doctors, at least for this summer. Indeed, they are the ones who keep the hospital at arm’s length during this holiday period, and who already run it for the rest of the year, despite their precarious status. Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Guineans, in the emergency room, out of 20 doctors, about fifteen have obtained their diploma abroad. “You find a lot of foreign doctors thereconfirms Jafar. It means that many French doctors no longer want to work there. Emergencies are painful and exhausting!”
These foreign doctors are now essential to the hospital. This summer, in Montfermeil, unlike many emergency services, there will be no scheduling problem, nor need to resort to temporary workers. The team is stable and united, some foreign doctors have been working there for ten years. And yet, their status is still precarious, denounces Haifa, a Franco-Tunisian who graduated in medicine in Tunisia.
“On a practical level, we are the front line, we are the emergency room, we are the operating theater, we are the resuscitation, we are the whole hospital. But when it comes to status, it’s no.”
Haifa, Franco-Tunisian doctorat franceinfo
“We occupy the same position as hospital practitioners with a French diploma, explains Haifa, we perform the same functions except that we are paid a quarter or even a fifth of the salary. For example, if we consider the salary of a hospital practitioner with an average of 8,000 euros, we will have the basic salary of 2,200 or 2,500 euros.”
The law allows these foreign doctors who have already practiced at least two years in the hospital in France to obtain a definitive authorization to practice. “There are commissions that have to deal with our files and it dragsexplains Jafar. We don’t understand why it’s dragged on for so long. Mouna, for example, it’s been dragging on for four years!” And he concludes: “The first wave of the Covid, we were already there with the patients. We will still be there this summer, but we would just like to be recognized as doctors in their own right.”