“Dear Patients, this letter to announce my departure from the office in December 2023”. It is with these words, written in a letter addressed to his patients, that Sandrine Gignoux announced the sad news. With another colleague, Doctor Mathilde Petit, she will leave the premises she occupies in Saint-Martin-d’Hères in December. After 17 years of practice as a general practitioner, it is heartbreaking. “It’s painful, I feel like I’m abandoning them”she sobbed.
The decision was not easy to make. She is the the result of a long journey, started with the Covid crisis. “I realized that I was no longer able to treat my patients as I wanted and that I was mourning the loss of the current health system”she explains. “In general medicine, we are a bit like the central link. Our role is to be able to refer people to specialists. But if we can no longer refer them correctly, that puts us in pain because we don’t have no longer the impression of going to the end of our care”.
Sandrine Gignoux in her consultation room. © Radio France – Romain Bitot
“Stop treating rather than doing it less well”
A feeling that Sandrine was able to observe within her corporation. “I saw colleagues around me who were taking time off and experiencing burnouts”, she says. A discomfort which also affected her and which she does not want to place on her 1,000 patients: “I saw that I was not doing well, that I was angry, that sometimes I wanted to send people away for consultations (…) I preferred to stop treating rather than to do less well”.
Concretely, this discomfort is the result of a lack of time. Time cut short by too many administrative tasks to complete, and by the ever-increasing demands of patients. Furthermore the lack of help from the State and communities. The most glaring illustration is the revaluation of consultations to 26.5 euros for general practitioners. Not enough according to the unions who called for an indefinite strike on Friday October 13.
An opinion shared by Sandrine. “This request for revaluation is only the visible part of the iceberg“, she tempers. “The demand behind it is to be able to have a little more money to be able to pay for larger premises and accommodate nurses, secretaries and therefore better welcome people in the end.”
1,000 patients without a treating doctor in December
The decision was well received by her patients, she says, like Isabelle. Sitting in the waiting room, she comes for her last consultation: “I was totally devastated when I heard the news of the closure. Now, I’m even distraught because Sandrine is someone I love very much. Frankly, I don’t know how I’m going to do it to find a doctor”,I am sorry for the one who was followed for 16 years by the doctor.
Sandrine’s choice also has repercussions on his intern, Lou, a young doctor in his seventh year of medicine trained by the doctor.
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Lou is a medical intern, trained by Sandrine Gignoux. © Radio France – Romain Bitot
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