120 deputies, senators and local elected officials deplore the lack of solutions against medical deserts. According to them, certain solutions such as telemedicine are not implemented well enough, while Agnès Buzyn believes the opposite.
In France, one city in three lacks general practitioners: the problem of medical deserts is a major concern for the French, as the great debate has shown. But, according to elected officials, the government is taking too long to react: in a column published in the Sunday newspaper, several elected officials are urging the government to act quickly regarding French people’s access to care. Indeed, it is urgent to take measures quickly to curb this problem of medical deserts: the number of doctors who will be retiring in the coming years is leading to the weakening of certain territories. “Solutions exist, some have been put in place, while others, such as telemedicine, are struggling to emerge (…). Why?” According to them, there is a reason for this: it is about the “administrative blockages of the reimbursement planned for the consultation“.
A plan for 2020
But the Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn is not of this opinion. Criticized by some of the health professionals, she claims “to have taken this subject head on” since she plans a change in the health model : the development of teleconsultations is indeed at the forefront. This would free up more time for GPs to follow more patients. But this requires that all doctors equip themselves, and that patients also adhere to it. If the Order of Physicians finds that things are going too slowly, the minister thinks the opposite. She points out that “more than 11,500 teleconsultations have already been carried out, or 1,000 per week”. Another of these measures is the sharing of tasks between health professionals: it thus plans to increase the number of multidisciplinary health centres.
A final challenge remains to be met: the massive retirements of GPs, as half of them are now over 60 years old. To stop this, Agnès Buzyn assures that she will further soften the recourse to the combination of employment and retirement for doctors in medical deserts, “by increasing the ceiling for exemption from supplementary old-age contributions”. For her, it is normal that a problem that has existed for several years takes time to be resolved: “I inherited thirty years of policies to reduce the number of doctors for which we are paying the price today”, he said. she regrets.
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