With 121 general practitioners per 100,000 inhabitants, Toulouse is sorely lacking in practitioners and patients are paying the price. While a third of the 565 practicing professionals will retire by 2027, their replacement is as much an emergency as a gauge.

The culprit of insufficient physician turnover is well known. Her name ? The numerus clausus, a law introduced in 1971 to stabilize the number of medical students. Faced with the shortage, well documented in rural areas, but still unknown in a large attractive city like Toulouse, the government decided to lift this restriction last year. Unfortunately, this highly anticipated decision will not be felt immediately. “We know that it takes ten years for the former doctors. We will have to wait for products, ”said Borhane Ferjani, general practitioner practicing at Reynerie, in Toulouse.

In addition, increasing the number of students is not enough if the State does not provide the means to increase the number of supervisors. According to Stéphane Oustric, director of the department of general medicine at the faculty of Toulouse, the lack of trainers prevents students in their fourth year of internship from carrying out internships in this branch. “If this fourth year of internship was not reserved for specialists, I could have put ten students in supervised autonomy in Toulouse since the start of the 2020 school year, another 10 more this year, he regrets. When we know that the majority of future doctors settle definitively and directly after their studies in the area where they started as collaborators, we could have had 20 new establishments all over the city, able to treat 30,000 more patients. . “Trainers, there would be a lack of at least 3,500, according to Yaël Thomas, president of the National Association of Medical Students of France (AnemF), to be able to properly supervise generalist students in 4th year.

However, it is this path that the government is exploring to make up for the lack of practitioners in the short term. “The government will propose to Parliament in the Social Security financing bill for 2023 the addition of a fourth year to the diploma of specialized studies in general medicine”, announced the Ministers of Health and Higher education, François Braun and Sylvie Retailleau, by . . .