"But where are the dentists?" In Finistère, finding a dental surgeon is a challenge: dental emergencies are overwhelmed and patients sometimes have to drive more than an hour to treat a cavity. Faced with this shortage of practitioners, the university is going to train more.
"If I don't get hired today, I'll blow a fuse," says Antoine Touahri, 18, leaning against the door of the dental emergency department at Brest University Hospital.
Suffering from inflamed gums, the young job seeker with dark circles under his eyes drove for an hour and a half from Cap Sizun to reach Brest before the service opened. Given the crowds, he was asked to come back in the afternoon.
"I had a dentist when I was little and he died. In my area, there's no one except cows," says the young man, who hasn't been to see a dentist since he was 12.
A dentist, Mélanie Glaçon, 37, who is waiting for an abscess, also had one in the past, but "he retired." "I've been on the waiting list for a year. Dentists aren't taking new patients," says this resident of the Crozon peninsula.
Since 2019, the number of patients attending Brest's emergency departments has increased from 4,000 to "more than 13,000" per year, according to Sylvie Boisramé, dean of the Brest faculty of dentistry. "And we can't take everyone because there aren't enough of us," she says.
– “Not enough practitioners”-
With one dental surgeon for every 1,437 inhabitants in Finistère, and even one for every 1,708 inhabitants in Côtes d'Armor, the workload of Breton dentists sometimes reaches double the national average (831 patients per year and per dentist on average).
Result: most of the Breton municipalities are classified as red (very under-equipped areas), as is the vast majority of the French territory. Even in Brest, a city in an "intermediate" zone (neither under-equipped nor over-equipped), finding a dentist who accepts new patients has become mission impossible.
"There is the best social coverage of all time in dentistry, but there are not enough practitioners to meet demand. I understand that the patient complains," notes Gilles Gourga, president of the regional council of the order of dental surgeons of Brittany.
In some areas, dentists themselves are on the verge of burnout, according to Ms Boisramé, who remembers a young practitioner "suffering" in Morbihan, having to turn away patients.
While population growth and aging have increased demand for dental care, France has a number of dentists per capita significantly lower than the European average, according to a report from the National Observatory of the Demography of Health Professions.
And the new practitioners, half of whom are trained abroad (Spain, Portugal, Romania, etc.), are more often employees and "work less in terms of time", points out Mr. Gourga.
– “Train more”-
Therefore, "the number one issue is that we need to train more dental surgeons in France," believes Professor Boisramé, who has undertaken to increase the number of students in the next dental school class by 40% for the 2025 academic year.
"It's going to be a bit tight," she admits, even though the specialty only occupies a single corridor in the medical school building.
In order to "better network the territory", the dean also advocates for the opening of dental treatment rooms in local hospitals, where students would do their final year internship. "We know that a student who is doing well in his final internship will settle nearby", she explains.
The experiment, already successfully carried out in Carhaix (Finistère), is to be extended to Quimper at the start of the school year, before possible replicas in Lorient (Morbihan) and Saint-Brieuc.
Vianney Descroix, president of the conference of deans of dentistry, goes further and even advocates a dose of "coercion" in the installation of young dentists to combat medical desertification.
"It wouldn't shock me if someone told a young graduate: for the next two years, you're going to work at such and such a place. In Germany, that's already happening," he says.
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