Medical deserts: “Coercion risks driving an entire generation away from the profession”

I am a general practitioner and I am 30 years old. My short professional experience, but long as a student (on the benches of medicine at 17 years old), in the hospital and in the office, has confronted me daily with the consequences of the lack of general practitioners: patients in the emergency room for avoidable complications, random post-hospitalization care in the absence of close monitoring, requests every day to find a general practitioner... All this in Paris.

Faced with the health emergency, the Garot bill in the National Assembly [another bill, with different recommendations, has just been voted on in the Senate ] aims to force doctors to set up in under-resourced areas. This seems attractive on paper: it's about seizing a resource in short supply, doctors, and spreading them out everywhere. But if the doctor chooses to set up, it's because there is work, and therefore patients.

Imposing a practice location is to deprive the profession of a fundamental element of its appeal. Asking young doctors, after their internships and residencies, already marked by personal sacrifices, to settle in a designated location when their lives have been built elsewhere, will be counterproductive. This risks alienating an entire generation from the profession—to the direct detriment of patients. Imposing is not healing: coercion threatens the medical profession.

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