“Doctors are men and women like any other. They exercise a difficult profession, for which they have studied extensively and sacrificed part of their youth, but which remains a profession, and not a priesthood. We are at the service of patients and their health, we are not their servants“, proclaim Dr. Richard Talbot and Dr. Frédéric Villeneuve, president of Union Généraliste, the general practitioner branch of the Federation of Physicians of France, through a column published by our colleagues from Doctissimo.
Indeed, private doctors have not been spared in recent years. Endless working days, a glaring lack of resources and now the Valletoux-Garrot bill, already voted on at first reading in the National Assembly, and which multiplies the constraints for the liberals: constraint on installation, constraint on participation to the permanence of care, constraint of participation in CPTS (territorial professional health communities), constraint of early declaration of cessation of activity and constraint of delegation of tasks without delegation of responsibility. For general practitioners, the cup is full and they have chosen Friday October 13, 2023 to shout their “fed up”.
Consequently, all consultation activities and technical acts are deprogrammed.
“From Friday October 13, liberal medicine will stop to send a strong signal to the public authorities. Unquestionably it’s Black Friday, and it will be renewed“, declared for his part Philippe Cuq, president of the Bloc (surgeons’ union) and spokesperson for the inter-union, during a press conference this Tuesday. What to do if you need an appointment on Friday October 13? Explanations.
Do you need to see your general practitioner?
First of all, even if the inter-union warns that many private doctors will follow this strike, call your doctor to check if he will be able to honor his appointment. If he is on strike, the instruction from the inter-union is to transfer him to the public hospital.
You will then be offered to “dial 15 if necessary“, where regulating doctors can refer the patient. Note that the emergency departments of many hospitals are already overwhelmed: finding a doctor may therefore be difficult.
Soline Guillaumin, spokesperson for the Doctors for Tomorrow collective, advises against using pharmacists to compensate for the absence of your doctor: “a doctor, he makes a diagnosis, he palpates the patient, examines him and questions him. The pharmacist does not palpate, does not examine and has not been trained to make a diagnosis“, she adds.
Future strikers recall that this action is made necessary by the current situation. “Going on strike, for a doctor, is not trivial. A doctor is a vocation and going on strike is complicated,” emphasizes BFMTV.com Franck Devulder, president of the Confederation of French Medical Unions.