For years now, Doctor Yazid Nabti has spent almost more time fighting with the administration than treating patients. Actually no, because he sees sick people passing through his office in Coudekerque-Branche, near Dunkirk, this general practitioner. Perhaps too much, since according to him, the Primary Health Insurance Fund (CPAM) of Flanders criticizes him for prescribing too many work stoppages. Questioned by BFM Grand Lille, Dr Nabti denounces a kind of harassment and has started a hunger strike.
“20 years of harassment by the Social Security with the blessing of the order of doctors”, wrote Doctor Nabti on a cardboard sign, hung near the tent where he has been carrying out his hunger strike for nineteen days, place Jean-Bart, in Dunkirk. At his office, closed “for medical reasons”, he no longer sees patients. However, some come to support him in his approach. An extreme approach, the only solution to warn of a fed up which does not date from yesterday.
A surge of pressure from the CPAM in 2020
Already, in 2020, Dr. Nabti had threatened to stop eating for the same reasons that pushed him to really do it today. “I’m tired of people criminalizing work stoppages,” the doctor told the Voice of the North. His rant in 2020 followed the visit of a CPAM medical advisor who put pressure on him. “He told me that I was in the orange zone and that we must not reach red otherwise I would be placed under supervision,” he told our colleagues.
Four years later, he’s at the same point, but even more tired than he already was. According to the doctor, the CPAM of Flanders still criticizes him for prescribing too many sick days. And according to his comments to BFM, it is indeed the number that poses the problem and not their quality: “I was confirmed that all my stops were justified but that it was more a problem of numbers”.
Doctors who prescribe too much in the viewfinder
A figure whose importance Dr Nabti does not dispute, but which he partly blames on hospital doctors. “The CPAM counts the stops we make [les généralistes] because hospital doctors don’t want to bother with administration,” he laments at the microphone of our colleagues.
In 2020, the CPAM of Flanders rejected any threat of placing the practitioner under supervision, instead referring to “support”. Contacted this Thursday by 20 minutes, Health Insurance has not yet responded, but the answer is certainly in the government’s open fight against the explosion in the number of sick leave in ten years, going from 6.4 million in 2012 to nearly 9 million in 2022. After launching a vast campaign to control doctors deemed to prescribe too much, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, asked himself: “Does anything justify that sick leave has increased by 30% in recent years? “.