Illustrative image of a doctor. – Thomas SAMSON / AFP
The shortage of doctors settles for a few years in France, warns a study by the Drees published this Friday. As the French population ages, the number of doctors will decrease until 2024 and this “low” should not be caught up until 2035.
The projections of the statistical service of social ministries are timely, while the “national conference” responsible for setting the number of health students for the next five years meets for the first time this Friday. The issue is crucial for doctors and pharmacists, whose short-term decline is inevitable: for the former, the workforce “decreases until 2024” then “returns to the current level by 2030”; for the latter, the low point will be reached in 2027 and the delay made up in 2033.
Lack of pharmacists
Except that in the meantime the French population will continue to grow and age, increasing its “care needs”. By integrating these data, “a more significant dip” is emerging, which would not be absorbed until 2035 for doctors, and even in 2049 for pharmacists. But a 20% increase in the number of medical students from the start of the 2021 school year would make it possible to “fill this hollow with an advance of about three years”. In pharmacy, this would save more than ten years, with an “initial level exceeded from the second half of the 2030s”.
It remains to be seen what the effect of this call for air would be on the flow of foreign graduates, which has steadily increased over the past decade, supported in particular by the many young French people who have gone to study in Europe in order to bypass the “Numerus clausus” then in force in France, before returning to settle there.
This is particularly true for dentists, whose numbers are expected to swell 48% by 2050, but only 5% without foreign graduates – with a low until around 2040. The same goes for midwives, whose number would only increase by 19% over the period, instead of 27% with foreign graduates.