Medical nomadism: behavior of certain patients who multiply consultations with different practitioners regarding the same pathology. In 2024, the expression takes on a whole new meaning at the Olympe Imagerie medical imaging center in Antony (Hauts-de-Seine), in the close southern suburbs of Paris. Medical nomadism: increasingly frequent and long journeys to which patients are forced in times of medical desertification.
Car parked facing the center’s entrance, numbered ticket in hand, some of those waiting in the rows of seats in the vast waiting room have traveled hundreds of kilometers. This Thursday at the end of winter, they traveled from Blois (Loir-et-Cher), Orléans (Loiret), Chartes (Eure-et-Loir) or Sens (Yonne), they climbed on a train to Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine), Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), Niort (Deux-Sèvres), Tours (Indre-et-Loire) or Poitiers (Vienne). “Some even arrive by plane from Toulouse, via Orlyknows Doctor Sébastien Tavolaro, radiologist. They spend a medical week in the Paris region, carrying out examinations and appointments with various specialists…”
“Patients come from further and further away, as the years go by. Not just for MRIs, even for ultrasounds, complements his colleague and associate, Doctor Alexandre Schull; 10% of our patients live in the Centre-Val de Loire region. It is not acceptable to wait three months for an MRI in Nantes for suspected brain metastases! We receive worried people who are very happy to stop by at 11 p.m.…” Because to absorb more patients (230,000 in 2023) and facilitate their road travel, the radiology center is now open evenings, weekends and nights – four per week, with additional fee overruns. Antony’s radiologists, at the forefront, observe the (imposed) medical tourism of French people in France.
A meeting at midnight
Six million of them do not have a doctor. In around forty departments, there are fewer than forty practitioners (all specialties combined) per 100,000 inhabitants. Index of the aging of the population, but also of the distances that stretch between home and doctors: 6 billion euros of health transport costs were reimbursed, under certain conditions, by Health Insurance in 2023, compared to 4 billion in 2012. A drop in the ocean of health travel imposed by a distended health network.
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