The doctors’ waiting room has never been so aptly named. An Ifop survey carried out for the Jalma firm, and made public by Les Echos.fr, shows that appointment times are constantly getting longer.
Admittedly, the phenomenon is known, but this study has the merit of demonstrating that ophthalmologists are not the only ones concerned. To obtain an appointment with an eye specialist, the French must wait an average of 111 days. That’s seven days longer than two years ago. But, as Les Echos point out, with a gynecologist, it takes 57 days, with a dermatologist 50 days, and even with a general practitioner, you have to be more and more patient: 6 days of waiting instead of 4 two years ago. A minority of French people (44%) consider it easy to access a specialist.
Access to care is therefore not just a financial issue. When Ifop asks the French why they had to give up care, 55% blame the appointment times and 30% the cost of the consultation. Les Echos even set the record straight by emphasizing that “tariff flexibility goes hand in hand with shorter lead times”. “In regions where overruns are frowned upon, such as the Grand Ouest and Sud-Ouest, there are no more ophthalmologists,” said Mathias Matallah, from Jalma, interviewed in Les Echos. The possibility of exceeding is essential when you have to invest 1 million euros to set up your practice, while you have the same basic rates as the cardiologist, who needs much less investment. »
And the situation is not likely to improve! According to calculations by the Jalma firm, “between 2010 and 2020, the medical time available for people with chronic illnesses will drop by 40%”.
Of course, the government has already taken steps to bring doctors and citizens closer together. In December 2012, the Minister of Health, Marisol Touraine, for example created her “Territory Health” Pact, with in particular contracts for general medicine practitioners which offer practitioners who settle in a medical desert a guarantee of income and improved social protection in terms of maternity or sick leave. For ophthalmology, the delegation of tasks to other health professionals – orthoptists – is slowly being organised. But difficult to fight against a fundamental movement: if the delays are getting longer, it is because the doctors of today are not those of yesterday. They want a better quality of life and refuse to be forced to do anything. Finding an appointment on a Saturday is therefore sometimes a challenge. And to earn a better living, they are hyper-specialising. Medical gynecologists, whose mission is to monitor the lives of women at each stage of their genital life, are for example called to disappear.
In the meantime, the French are rushing to the emergency room and the hole in the social security system is struggling to be absorbed.