After the retirement of four doctors since the beginning of the year in Colomiers, the bleeding will continue with seven additional doctors who will stop consulting by the end of next year.
Even if the city is not a medical desert, Colomiers does not escape the shortage of doctors. Eleven of them will retire at the end of 2024. A situation that will not make life easier for practitioners who are already very busy and powerless in the face of this chronic crisis.
“Every day, three or four people ask me to take them as a general practitioner and I cannot”, regrets doctor Saloua Zaghdoudi. “Sometimes they are very old patients who are not transported so I accept them even if for two years I have not taken a lunch break. People should not come to the point of pulling their teeth like in Great Britain themselves because they don’t have a dentist”.
Care and prevention in danger
The difficulty of finding a general practitioner also makes health professionals fear a lack of prevention in the face of vaccinations, screenings, STDs or even obesity.
“In this period of tension, it is necessary to mobilize young doctors to encourage them to settle in Colomiers”, estimates Doctor Simon Mathé, responsible for access to care at the office of the CPTS (Community professional territorial health ). “When I moved in 2018, there were around forty general practitioners in Colomiers and today there are only around thirty of us… As part of the CPTS, we are working on attractiveness in order to obtain a help from the public authorities. I think it would also be good for a town of 40,000 inhabitants to create a multidisciplinary health center. This kind of structure appeals to young doctors because it allows teamwork, to have a secretarial and reduce administrative tasks”.
Doctors who also complain a lot about the multiplication of requests for medical certificates by organizations and communities to obtain repairs in their accommodation or to obtain aid. “It is time to refocus on our role of care and prevention,” insists Dr. Zaghdoudi, who plans to become an internship supervisor. “I’m going to get closer to the medical school to pass a diploma at the end of the internship and welcome a young doctor in the hope of making him stay”. Ten doctors are currently internship supervisors at Colomiers, which regularly leads to the integration of young graduates into practices, such as, recently, at the Allégorie medical centre.