Every morning, Marie Dupin slips into the skin of a personality, an event, a place or a fact at the heart of the news.
In the Lot department, the opening of a new dental center turned into a rat race. In this department, which has only 58 dentists per 100,000 inhabitants, the brand new center has received up to 1,000 calls per day. Dentists were forced to call the police to turn away patients on opening day. Since then, the door has been locked.
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The shortage of dentists is also a problem in Hauts-de-France, the fourth most populous region in France, where there are only 43 professionals per 100,000 inhabitants. In Brittany, seven out of ten municipalities have no dentists. Everywhere in France, rural municipalities, but also medium-sized towns are concerned. The government has just created a new profession, level 2 dental assistants which are supposed to save dentists time, but these assistants will not be operational for at least five years. As to new training centers in the most under-resourced areas, they do not solve the problem of the total number of dentists trained in France.
The number of dentists remains stable in France
For decades, France has had 40,000 dentists while the population continues to increase. Half of the new dentists counted each year come from other European countries, Spain, Portugal and Romania. If the closed number has been abolished, French faculties lack the means to buy the necessary equipment to train more students. The profession is currently negotiating, like every five years, its agreement with social security. On the menu of discussions, there may be additional aid for young practitioners and students who agree to settle in an under-resourced area.
How to make them want to establish themselves, in the long term, in these entire regions deserted by public services, bakeries, post offices, schools and without work for the spouses? This is a problem that successive governments have failed to address. Creating new financial incentives, without regulating land use planning, is a half solution. Until the problem is addressed at the root, patients will not have real solutions.
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