In the waiting room where she is patient with her two children, Estelle Gall, 45, is in despair: “we find ourselves without a doctor. It is very worrying that you cannot be followed, especially when you have children“.
The mother claims to have contacted around twenty GPs: “the refusals are categorical: they no longer take. They’re already overloaded and there’s no way to be healed“, she says.
The health center, where two retired practitioners and a young part-time doctor work, is due to close on June 30.
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In the office of Doctor Fabrice Gauvin, one of the retired doctors, consultations are linked at a steady pace. Dramatic situations too.
Colette Magnier, 80, has to renew her prescriptions for heart problems. This closure, “it’s the tile“. “I am unhappy and I still cry“, she testifies, on the verge of tears, after having suffered the refusals of five practitioners from Montluçonnais.
“I have friends who came on foot, they don’t have a car, how are they going to do it?“she wonders in front of the helpless doctor.
– “They will meet in the emergency room” –
“We think that 20% of patients will manage to relocate (…) but you have, roughly speaking, 7 to 8,000 patients who will wander, who will not be treated. I have seen some who had not had a doctor for two years, with disasters on the analyzes … They will end up in the emergency room.“, predicts Fabrice Gauvin.
Because the lack of doctors is glaring in this former workers’ territory. The Montluçonnais basin – 70,000 inhabitants – had sixty general practitioners in 2014, against only 32 today, details the doctor.
When he himself had to retire in 2018, some of his patients, worried about not being able to find a replacement, created the Association of abandoned patients looking for doctors.
The idea was to pay practitioners “because this is what corresponds to the demand of young graduates, who want a lower number of working hours“, explains Philippe Busseron, vice-president of the association.
The project materializes in September 2020, with the opening of the center: “it’s an economic model that works perfectly“, according to him.
The structure quickly fills up; around 7,000 patients are registered.
So why close? “The main reason is the lack of manpower! The retired doctors, who were supposed to help us, did not wish to do so. I had offered to troubleshoot; and instead, I went through it all!“, says Doctor Gauvin.
– More than 800,000 euros invested –
Added to this are the difficulties in recruiting. Three foreign doctors practicing in the Paris region had given their agreement, but, “due to administrative constraints and the health crisis, they cannot be operational before December“, deplores the practitioner.
“The subject does not arise so much in terms of funding as of medical resources wishing to settle in the region“, confirms the Regional Health Agency.
“It’s a huge failure, but we have not been helped … The fault of politicians is that they have not done anything since 2018 when we alert them“, denounces, bitterly, Dr Gauvin.
The mayor of Montluçon Frédéric Laporte (LR), who states “work on a short-term solution“, recalls for his part having made available”free“the premises of the center.
The town hall had invested more than 800,000 euros in this structure where it had itself failed to install liberal doctors.
Presented as the panacea to fight against medical deserts, health centers have been highlighted for several years by successive health ministers. France has around 2,000, including 428 multiprofessionals, according to figures from the ministry.
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But for the mayor of Montluçon, “the final solution is that we + oblige + – in quotation marks – doctors to spend a given time in deprived areas. (…) As long as this is not said to the face, we will not solve this problem“.
