He was the only one in his family to refuse to borrow what his grandparents called “a royal road”. Medicine ? “I wanted a world, an adventure of my own”writes Emmanuel Macron in his programmatic book Revolution (XO, 2016). Son of a hospital neurologist and a medical consultant with a thwarted vocation as a pediatrician, brother of a nephrologist and a radiologist, son-in-law of a hospital psychiatrist but also nephew of a general practitioner and a ophthalmologist, the Head of State grew up surrounded by health professionals. This family line suggests that the President of the Republic knows the codes, the constraints, the joys and the setbacks of one of the most popular professions in France, long pampered by power.
And yet. For a month, in the midst of a triple epidemic (influenza, Covid-19 and bronchiolitis) and overload of hospital emergency services, the divorce between doctors and the Elysée Palace has spread in the press and television news. The town doctor is in bad shape. So badly that he goes on strike. The rare interruption, from December 26, 2022 to January 8, of the activity of these practitioners, yesterday devoted confidants of families, makes the executive shudder, shocked. “It’s really not responsible to go on strike, especially during this holiday season”was indignant the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, on January 3 on Franceinfo. “Any strike that takes the health of the French people hostage, I will condemn it”supported, on Thursday, the Minister of Health, François Braun, an emergency doctor who, when he himself protested, stuck a plaster ” strike “ on his blouse while remaining at his post. A few hours later, several thousand general practitioners paraded in Paris, under the windows of the Ministry of Health.
Does Emmanuel Macron want today to strengthen the link with the liberal doctors or “put everyone back together”, as he stormed, Thursday, from the Elysée, during the traditional “republican galette”? Mystery. The Head of State was to present his “wishes to the world of health”, Friday, in Corbeil-Essonnes (Essonne) in the pediatric department of the South Ile-de-France Hospital Center. An unprecedented initiative aimed at “to set a course” available in “very concrete announcements”, assures the Elysée, without revealing the state of mind of the head of state vis-à-vis the strikers. Measures which, we are assured, will not interfere with the work in progress of the National Council for Refoundation devoted to health, since they would be the fruit of“permanent maieutics” who “results from exchanges in a fundamental movement and interaction with all the actors at various and varied levels”.
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