By 2028, health spaces will be deployed in nearly 300 stations in France to combat medical deserts, promises the SNCF.
“We are making a solution available to public authorities”declared Saturday November 18 on franceinfo Raphaël Poli, general director of Retail and Connections at SNCF, while the company announced Friday that it was going to deploy, by 2028, telemedicine spaces in nearly 300 stations in France, in order to to fight against medical deserts.
The stations selected to benefit from the system will be “located in priority intervention zones (ZIP) and concerted development zones (ZAC), characterized by an insufficient supply of care and difficulty in accessing care”or 1,735 potential stations, explains in a press release SNCF Gares et Connexions.
A face-to-face nurse and a remote doctor
“You will have health spaces that you can access when you take the train, or if you are a local resident” from the station, explains Raphaël Poli. “The novelty”, he continues, “in these spaces, you will not be alone in front of a computer screen”like when you do a teleconsultation at home: “You will have a nurse who welcomes you and you will have, if the communities are willing, all the equipment that allows you to have a consultation with a general practitioner”. Raphaël Poli cites an available stethoscope as an example: “The nurse places the stethoscope on your heart and a doctor can listen remotely to make a health diagnosis.”
Raphaël Poli hopes that these teleconsultation spaces “are included in the care pathways”. The SNCF executive specifies that the doctors concerned will be trained in France.
It is not a question of having a platform with 150 doctors on the other side of the world who respond to the person who is in the depths of Auvergne.
Raphaël Poli, general manager SNCF Retails & Connexionsat franceinfo
Concerning the locations of these spaces, the general director of Retail and Connections at SNCF specifies that “it is the public authorities who have set the criteria, the medical deserts”, then, the company “looked at what[elle] could put on the table to make things easier.
Raphaël Poli recalls that “10 million travelers” are welcomed every day at the station, and that “9 out of 10 French people live less than 10 km from a train station”. The question then was: “What can we do to facilitate this debate and provide elected officials and patients with spaces that can be useful to them? Our mission is also to contribute to regional planning”concludes Raphaël Poli.
The measure will “perhaps undress Peter to dress Paul”
For Gérard Raymond, president of France Assos Santé, this solution, in the context of a shortage of doctors, will “perhaps undress Peter to dress Paul” because “the doctor who will do teleconsultation will not do consultation”.
“Why not organize ourselves in a different way, so that these teleconsultations are rather face-to-face consultations with an organization of teams in a given territory?” asks Gérard Raymond, who doubts the benefit of the system . “Our fellow citizens who want to travel, who go to a station, they do not go there to have a consultation on their state of health. They go there above all to have a train that leaves and arrives on time.”