The reasons for anger. Although the liberal doctors’ strike has been renewed for a new week, the health professionals, who are called to demonstrate this Thursday in Paris to obtain a revaluation of the consultation and an improvement in their working conditions, are more than just witnesses from one day to day. where the patient is no longer his priority.
BFMTV was able to follow Dr. Joël Valendoff, a Parisian general practitioner who is also the manager of Maison de santé Faidherbe, in the capital’s 11th arrondissement, for a day that starts at 9am and doesn’t end until around midnight. In the afternoon, about forty patients follow one another in his office, while the morning is reserved mainly for home visits.
“At 10 in the morning or I visit nursing homes, many times I go to visit the elderly who cannot come to the office, I don’t even have time to eat,” he describes.
“Our core business is no longer medicine”
However, this already hectic pace must also be combined with a whole series of subsidiary tasks that family doctors face.
“What patients don’t see is all we have to do in terms of administration,” says Joël Valendoff.
“The fifth of what we have to do is the consultation. Apart from that, we have imperatives with the CPAM, the URSSAFF, and our core business is no longer medicine ”, he still evokes.
According to him, it is this point that is at the base of the deterioration of the work of general practitioners and the one that justifies the doubling of the price of the consultation, which they want to go from 25 to 50 euros. In fact, this administrative time is not paid and professionals estimate that of the current 25 euros, only 10 are direct salaries.
“There has to be someone for the reception of patients, someone for the daily management of the practice and the doctor for his core business. That is what you have to understand, it is a collective exercise with staff that you have to pay for”, he further explains. .
In this health center for which he is responsible, some thirty doctors associate to share the famous administrative tasks.
What update?
For his part, the director of Health Insurance, Thomas Fatôme, assures that general practitioners will be well updated within the framework of the conventional negotiation that must resume “from the beginning of next week” to be completed before the end of February.
But an amount of “50 euros would be relatively extravagant,” he says.
After a first strike at the beginning of December, this collective launched on Facebook (16,000 members) called for the closure of medical offices after Christmas, a movement that lasted until January 8. He says that 70% of general practitioners were on strike last week, Health Insurance estimates the drop in activity by 10%.
Source: BFM TV
