Health Minister Yannick Neuder unveiled on Friday the map of the 151 areas that will benefit, starting in September, from the support of general practitioners, for up to two days per month, to combat medical deserts.
With this map, which identifies 151 priority inter-municipal areas for access to care, "we are not addressing medical deserts" since they affect "87% of the country" but "it is a first step" which will benefit around 2 million patients, specified the minister interviewed on BFMTV.
This division is the result of work "carried out with prefects, regional health agencies, local elected officials, and also health professionals, to identify particularly deprived areas," he explained.
According to him, it allows us to "identify and provoke collective solidarity in these territories, a collective commitment on September 1st."
On April 25, a government measure was adopted to establish a "mandatory territorial solidarity mission," requiring all doctors practicing in well-supplied areas to "project" themselves into priority areas for up to two days per month.
"We're going to encourage doctors, and then we also have to fine-tune the system, find the places, the medical centers, the offices that are available to accommodate patients," said Mr. Neuder.
"These maps also make it possible to work on the locations where 3,700 junior doctors will be able to settle, new doctors" who "will not arrive until November 2026."
Faced with a shortage of doctors, a reform of access to the second year of medicine was adopted on June 18 to enable the training of more professionals.
The government also intends to "recover French students who have gone abroad, to Romania and Spain" to study medicine, Mr. Neuder recalled, thus predicting "more than 20% doctors by 2027, or nearly 50,000 doctors."
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