Making an appointment with a specialist doctor or finding an attending physician is increasingly complicated, particularly in Île-de-France and Center-Val-de-Loire: this is one of the conclusions of the latest report by the directorate of research, studies, evaluation and statistics (DREES) published this Friday February 14, 2020.
While in 2015, 2.5 million French “only” (!) Lived in a medical desert, they were 3.8 million in 2018. In short: “the share of the French population living in an under-dense area (i.e. having access to less than 2.5 consultations per year and per inhabitant)“jumped”in four years, from 3.8% to 5.7%“.
How to explain this increase? The DREES (which is part of the Ministry of Health) suggests two hypotheses: first, “the overall decrease in the number of practicing physicians as a result of numerous retirements, which the new facilities do not compensate for“. Deuzio:”the prolonged effect of numerus clausus“which limit the number of practitioners trained in recent decades …
Which regions are most affected? In mainland France, Île-de-France won the (sad) prize for the medical desert: 1.8 million inhabitants live in the “under-dense“, which means that they do not have access to 3 medical consultations a year. Next comes the Center-Val-de-Loire region where 318,000 people are affected by the lack of doctors. The DREES specifies that, in these two regions, “the number of general practitioners decreased by 4.2% and 5.8% respectively“within 4 years.
In Paris and Tours, general practitioners are scarce
Beyond the metropolis, it is in Guyana that the situation is most dramatic: the region is currently affected by a “very strong demographic growth“and about half of the population (44.2%, or about 120,000 people) suffers from the lack of doctors.
What exactly is a medical desert? A medical desert is defined as a territory where the medical offer is insufficient to meet the needs of the population: this translates into waiting times to obtain an abnormally long appointment and, sometimes, in the foregoing of care by the population concerned.
Very concretely, the Ministry of Health estimates that there is a medical desert when (in a territory) the density of doctors in relation to the population is at least 30% lower than the national average.
In its report published this Friday, the DREES provides some avenues for reflection: “the areas best endowed with general practitioners are also the most attractive, both from the point of view of demographic growth and of facilities (sports, cultural, commercial and educational) (…) There is therefore a more global problem of development of the territory“.
Sources:
DREES – Ministry of Solidarity and Health
Medical deserts: how to define them? How to measure them? (DREES)
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