Deputy Frédéric Valletoux’s bill on access to care is being debated this week in the Social Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, and will be examined in plenary session from Monday, June 12. It arouses opposition from doctors’ unions, some of which are calling for a strike this Friday, June 9. Frédéric Valletoux, MP Horizons – presidential majority – gives details on what will change.
The Point: Your bill is generating a lot of comments. But what, really, is your main goal?
Frédéric Valletoux: Faced with the progression of medical deserts, in a large part of the country, we cannot sit idly by and we need better organization of care. My bill is supported by the government. It is therefore necessary to strengthen, in particular, the permanence of care, what used to be called on-call duty, especially during the night, as well as at weekends, by calling on more health professionals than is the case today.
Concretely, who will have to be put more to work? We want clinic doctors to participate more in the continuity of care. Currently, most often, when there is a road accident in the middle of the night, the injured are transported to hospitals and not to clinics, because there are not enough medical specialists on duty in these establishments.
However, it is absolutely necessary to relieve the hospital. We are therefore going to extend the permanence of care to specialist doctors in clinics, who will have to do more on-call duty. Clinics are therefore integrated into the permanent care system of health establishments.
We have to stop with the over-interpretations! We propose, in this text, that liberal doctors all belong, henceforth, to a “territorial professional health community”. It is an organization that allows doctors, nurses and pharmacists to work together, in good agreement with the public authorities. But if they absolutely do not want to, they can always unsubscribe. However, we want to bring some liberal doctors out of their splendid isolation. The population wants it and so do the younger generations of doctors.
Some unions, such as the Union of Free Medicine Federations and the Doctors for Tomorrow collective, are very critical of your text. They call for the closure of medical offices this Friday, June 9th. What do you think ?
I listen to doctors. But some unions are quite caricatural and their words shock many elected officials. Mayors have told me that they face the difficulties of the population to make an appointment with the doctor and they no longer understand the ideological postures of certain unions. I notice that others, like the CSMF [the Confederation of French Medical Unions, editor’s note] and MG France, have not taken up this movement. We must move forward.
I don’t want to get the wrong fight. My bill is not intended to regulate care. Some had imagined that the installation of new doctors should be validated by the regional health agencies, and therefore, in a way, that their freedom of installation would be called into question. This is not the case.
The observation that we make is that we lack doctors in France, for demographic reasons and lack of training for too long. So we can’t turn everything upside down. On the other hand, as indicated, we can improve the system in the area of ??the guards. And it is necessary. This is why I do not quite understand these outcry and these polemics launched on my bill.
The President of the Republic and the Prime Minister have said very clearly that they want things to move forward and that the territorial organization of our healthcare system needs to be improved. It is sometimes the health administration itself that is the most difficult to convince, but we are getting there. Our country cannot remain paralyzed by certain corporatisms. We are hopeful that we will find solutions.
