The liberal doctors demand concessions, and threaten to continue their strike. The Ministry of Health is delighted with a normal emergency situation.
The liberal doctors did not flinch. The strike movement started on Tuesday, December 23, should continue until December 31 – and even beyond January 1, 2015, according to cross-press releases from the FMF (Federation of Doctors of France) and the CSMF (Confederation of Trade Unions. of French doctors), the main unions of liberal doctors.
“Nearly 80% of the cabinets are closed, including in the overseas departments”, rejoices the CSMF, which calls on the strikers to persevere and to publicly express their anger. “This mobilization demonstrates the exasperation and determination of the profession to obtain real and profound advances for city medicine, now seriously threatened”, we can read in a press release.
“No minimum proposal”
Liberal doctors are trying to put pressure on the Ministry of Health in order to obtain a rewrite of the Health bill. The strikers, outraged by the concessions made to the emergency workers, hope that the government will be so lenient with them. “The Minister will have to find means at least proportionally equivalent to those released in a few hours for public hospital emergency physicians”, writes the CSMF, which “will not accept minimum proposals which are not up to the stakes”.
These “proposals” will thus have to relate to the generalization of third-party payment, which liberal doctors strongly reject. The latter demand “the urgent opening of a price negotiation leading to the revaluation of medical acts”. Otherwise, the movement will continue.
No “particular difficulties” in emergencies
But the strikers’ threats do not seem to panic the government. In this “national week without liberal doctors”, the Ministry of Health is delighted in a press release “that no particular difficulty in the care of patients has been reported to date on the whole of the territory” .
The Minister of Health called on citizens to contact their doctor if necessary, then the Samu as a second resort. However, “the workforce of the emergency services tend to join those observed during the two previous years at the same period,” said the press release. An elegant way of saying that the strike of liberal doctors is far from having the desired effect.
The media singled out
What the CSMF refutes. “The liberal regulation centers are facing an exceptional influx of calls,” say the authors of the press release. But “for the first time, as if by chance, the press did not echo the overload of hospital emergencies during the holidays, when it had become a chestnut tree. From there to think that silence was part of the agreement…. They ask themselves.
The media, all in the loop? Some have nevertheless given in the eternal “chestnut”. West France mentions a “slight increase in admissions at Christmas” to the emergency rooms of Saint-Nazaire. The newspaper Paris Normandy notes an “overload” at the Le Havre hospital group… “that it is difficult to link to the strike because the end of the year is traditionally a period when city doctors are on vacation”.
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