Health Insurance is concerned about the shortage of general practitioners in France, which served 5.4 million people in 2019, including elderly patients and/or patients with chronic pathologies.
In France, 5.4 million patients did not have a general practitioner in 2019, despite an active search by more than half of them to find one.
This alarming finding was revealed by the Director General of Health Insurance, Nicolas Revel, in an interview with the magazine The Generalist. “There have always been, in recent years, about 10% of patients without a attending physician. In 2019, this was the case for 5.4 million patients,” he said, saying he was “very attentive” to the situation.
If some of those patients were young, healthy, and didn’t try to find one,”more than half of our fellow citizens without a general practitioner are actually looking for a regular practitioner, often because they have not been able to find one when their GP retires”, specifies Nicolas Revel. Among them, people aged 70 and over, others suffering from a long-term illness or a chronic pathology.
Doctor shortage escalates
“If we do nothing, this trend will inevitably increase in the coming years,” he rightly warns. According to estimates by the Ile-de-France Regional Health Agency, for example, 10,000 liberal doctors in the Ile-de-France will be of retirement age within three years and will not be replaced. The current workforce will then decrease by half, leaving 12 million additional patients without a practitioner.
In December 2018, thehe Order of Physicians already reported numerous disparities in its annual Atlas of medical demography. According to these data, the number of doctors in regular activity has decreased by 10% throughout the territory since 2010. This trend primarily concerns general practitioners. While there were 94,261 in regular activity in 2010, there were only 87,801 in 2018, a drop of 7.3% since 2010 (0.4% since 2017).
CNOM data also revealed an increase in inequalities between departments in terms of medical density. The least well-endowed departments had 1.6 times fewer generalists than the best-off, compared to 1.4 times in 2010.
Doctors refuse new patients
At the same time, nearly one out of two attending physicians would refuse to take on new patients, according to a survey by UFC-What to choose conducted with 2,770 general practitioners in 78 departments and published in November 2019. Contacted by the association “to find out if they were accepting new patients as general practitioners”, 44% of them replied in the negative. 9% answered that “they wanted to see the patient first before deciding”.
“If less than 20% of general practitioners refused new patients in Bas-Rhin, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the refusal rate climbed to 70% in Allier, 78% in Charente and even 86 % in Seine-et-Marne”, indicated UFC-Que Choisir, stressing against all odds that “the greatest difficulties are not encountered in the most important medical deserts, but more in peripheral France of medium-sized municipalities.”
More specifically, refusals would be fewer in territories where the medical offer is insufficient (39% refusal on average) than in those where the density is on the average (46%), probably because in the first case, doctors are aware that these new patients have no other alternative.
