Is it time to dig up the hatchet with liberal doctors? As the crisis in the hospital and in the emergency services worsens, the debate has been mounting around a sensitive proposal for several weeks in the medical community, not without causing strong tensions. Should we restore the duty of care of liberal doctors to hold the coming months? That is to say their participation in the “continuity of care”, in the evening, at night and on weekends? This obligation was removed at the dawn of the 2000s, after a mobilization of liberal doctors.
“This can no longer be a taboo subject, the issue of access to care is far too significant today”advances Frédéric Valletoux, at the head of the French Hospital Federation (FHF), who has always defended this return to obligation for his counterparts in the liberal world, and has done so again during these last months of presidential campaign. “We have to ask this subject territory by territory, the worst would be to continue to ostrich”he judges, regretting the “retribution and caricature” who dominate this debate.
“The situation forces us allabounds Rémi Salomon, head of the Conference of Presidents of CHU Establishment Medical Commissions. All doctors in hospitals and in the city must be mobilized to fill the on-call lists, the hospital alone will not hold, it is already no longer holding, the danger is a real break in access to care this summer. »
A solution that makes “no sense”
To date, just under 40% of general practitioners participate in outpatient care, according to the latest figures published by the National Council of the Order of Physicians in the spring, i.e. nearly 25,000 volunteer doctors out of 63,231 general practitioners. likely to participate. If there is a large “heterogeneity” according to the departments, the absence of on-call doctors poses a problem in the evenings and on weekends in many territories, we are assured in the ranks of emergency physicians, who see this as one of the reasons for the overload of their services .
Among the main interested parties, the barrage was nevertheless immediate. In a bitter press release signed by the six representative trade union organizations on May 19, the liberal doctors thrash the “lies and slips” of the president of the FHF. “The ills from which the public hospital suffers have only one explanation: the liberal doctors who would not do enough”they quip. “The average working time of liberal doctors easily exceeds fifty hours a week” and “nearly 9 out of 10 consultations are carried out by a liberal doctor”they defend themselves, calling instead for a “in-depth overhaul of the health system”.
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