Medical students sent to the front in medical deserts? Several hundred medical interns demonstrated Friday, October 14 in front of the Ministry of Health in Paris, as part of a day of strike organized by their unions. They protest against the extension of one year of their studies, a measure defended by the government, in particular to fill the lack of doctors in certain territories.
Elsewhere in France, 2,000 people mobilized in Lyon and 400 in Strasbourg, according to local media. The National Intersyndicale of Interns (ISNI) and that of General Medicine Interns (Isnar-IMG) are calling for the withdrawal of the measure establishing a fourth year of internship for future general practitioners, which would be carried out “priority in areas where medical demography is under-dense”according to the draft Social Security budget for 2023.
Only “on a voluntary basis”
In an interview with Release published on Friday, the Minister of Health, François Braun, considers that this conflict is “gone like wildfire on a misunderstanding” and ensures that originally this fourth year of studies was “a request from students”. After the demonstration, a delegation of union leaders was to be received by the minister’s office.
The additional year of studies provided for by the reform must be devoted to “outpatient courses” aiming to “prepare better” future doctors to practice in a medical office, he argues. And if these internships will have to be carried out “preferably in under-dense areas”the Minister promises that “It remains on a voluntary basis”.
Debated this week in the National Assembly, the contested article was validated by the deputies of the Social Affairs Committee, with a few formal amendments, in particular on the supervision of students by internship supervisors working in the same “basin of life”. “The interns will have university internship supervisors. There is no question of letting them go alone in the wild”promises Mr. Braun again.
A reform “carried out without consultation”
Not enough to satisfy the ISNI, which has been denouncing for two weeks a reform intended to “instrumentalize doctors in training to respond at a lower cost” problems of access to care and “carried out without consultation with the main stakeholders”.
The interns have since received the support of most of their elders. On the hospital side, the CGT, the CFE-CGC (executives), but also the practitioners of APH, the emergency doctors of the AMUF and the anesthetists of the SNPHARE announced their participation in the demonstration in front of the ministry.
Among the liberals, the CSMF, the first organization of the profession, approved the strike of the interns, judging “irresponsible” to send them alone to medical deserts. “Full Support” also from the Union of Liberal Physicians (SML), which considers that the measure amounts to making “to carry on the shoulders of the youth the weight of twenty-five years of errors of successive governments”. The main GP union, MG France, also shares “student concerns”while claiming “a fourth year meeting their legitimate expectations”.