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Dr Gérald Kierzek (Medical Director of Doctissimo)
To fight against medical deserts and therefore the absence of health professionals installed in certain territories, the SNCF launched a call for tenders to equip 1,735 stations with teleconsultation cabins. The opinion of Dr Gérald Kierzek, emergency doctor and medical director of Doctissimo
After the supermarkets, the train stations! Remember in 2021, the Monoprix brand announced that it would install consultation booths in its stores. A decision quickly denounced by the National Council of the Order of Physicians, recalling “with firmness that, according to article R.4127-19 of the public health code, “Medicine should not be practiced as a trade“”. After mass distribution, it is therefore the SNCF which announces the same project in stations.
More than 1,700 stations concerned in France
The SNCF therefore launched a call for tenders last February to equip 1,735 stations with a teleconsultation cabin. According to the SNCF, these cabins will be installed in “the halls, on the forecourts, in the car parks of the stations, or in premises inside the stations”.
If telemedicine will be the main activity, other activities “contributing to boosting the main activity and optimizing its economic model” may be authorized as a “paramedical offer” or the “selling products”.
The first cabins installed in 2024
By setting up this project, the SNCF declares that it wants to fight against medical desertification and allow access to care for the most isolated patients from a medical point of view.
But for Dr Gérald Kierzek, emergency physician and medical director of Doctissimo, this remains an aberration. “Medicine requires time, to examine the patient and follow-up with continuity in the care. We do not do medicine in teleconsultation. On the contrary, this encourages diagnostic errors and does not allow us to make prevention properly. That’s not medicine!” the doctor is indignant.
According to him, the priority is elsewhere:It is necessary to rehabilitate the territory in health professionals and to support the installation of general practitioners in these zones which are deprived of it… and incidentally to stop in the facts from devaluing this profession. Let’s go back to basics and teleconsultation tools should in no way replace the care pathway“. According to estimates, a thousand cabins could be installed in French stations by 2024.