Published on
Updated
Reading 2 mins.
According to information from France Inter, more than 200 deputies must table this Thursday an amendment against the freedom of installation of doctors. They want this to be “authorized” above all by the regional health agencies to better distribute the practitioners.
Faced with the regularly cited medical desert (6 million French people are currently without a doctor), the freedom of installation of doctors periodically comes to the fore. A bill to determine the conditions will thus be examined next week in the National Assembly. But a transpartisan group of more than 200 deputies wishes to table this Thursday afternoon a new amendment which is likely to make noise, since it asks that “Any new installation of a doctor or a dental surgeon is subject to the authorization of the regional health agency (ARS).
Towards an authorization to be able to settle down?
The idea is simple: it intends to authorize facilities where doctors are scarce and disapprove of them where several doctors are already working.
“Regulation is really the condition of efficiency. We say to doctors: don’t go and settle where the needs are already met. On the other hand, go and settle where you want, where your patients are waiting for you”explains Guillaume Garrot, socialist deputy carrying the amendment.
A measure already in force in the installation of pharmacists and notaries, but which should make the unions of doctors react.
Can adding constraints promote the establishment of doctors?
For Dr. Fabien Quedeville, general practitioner contacted by Doctissimo, the proposed amendment does not, however, provide a concrete response to the medical desert that is spreading in France.
“Rather than attacking the bottom of things, we are still putting in place measures that will probably never be applied or not applicable. But regularly, we come back to it, and the deputies thus have the impression of bringing their participation in the face of the problem of access to care”.
According to him, attacking the freedom of installation is irrelevant: “Let us already be told where there are “too many” doctors! While, once again, the real fundamental question would rather be “how to organize and value the role of each other in health in the existing model”.
The generalist also mentions the financial revaluation requested which is more at the heart of the attractiveness of the profession: “How can we still pay doctors at 25 euros, for increasingly long, increasingly complex consultations with more and more pathologies because people are living longer? That’s what we should be talking about!”
“Without constraint, new doctors are already having difficulty settling in. What will happen with new constraints?” concludes the doctor.