This Parisian doctor believes that medicine is no longer the core business of these health professionals, suffocated by administrative tasks which occupy the vast majority of their daily lives.
The Reasons Of The Wrath. While the strike of liberal doctors has been renewed for a new week, health professionals, who are called to demonstrate this Thursday in Paris to obtain a revaluation of the consultation and an improvement in their working conditions, are more in addition to witnessing a daily life where the patient is no longer their priority.
BFMTV was able to follow Doctor Joël Valendoff, a Parisian general practitioner who is also the manager of the Maison de santé Faidherbe, in the 11th arrondissement of the capital, for a day which begins at 9 a.m. and does not end until around from midnight. In the afternoon, about forty patients follow one another in his office, while the morning is primarily reserved for home visits.
“At 10 a.m., I will either make visits to nursing homes, I often go to visit the elderly who cannot come to the office, I don’t even have time to eat,” he describes.
“Our core business is no longer medicine”
However, this already frenetic pace must also combine with a whole series of subsidiary tasks with which GPs are confronted.
“What the patients do not see is all that we have to do in terms of administration”, assures Joël Valendoff.
“The fifth of what we have to do is the consultation. Apart from that, we have imperatives with the CPAM, the URSSAFF, and our core business is no longer medicine”, evokes he still.
According to him it is this point which is at the base of the deterioration of the work of the general practitioners and which justifies the doubling of the price of the consultation, which they wish to see go from 25 to 50 euros. This administrative time is in fact not remunerated and professionals estimate that out of the current 25 euros, only 10 are actually direct salaries.
“There must be someone for the reception of patients, someone for the daily management of the practice, and the doctor for his core business. That’s what you have to understand, it’s a collective exercise with staff that must be paid”, he further explains.
In this health center for which he is responsible, around thirty doctors are associated in order to pool the famous administrative tasks.
What upgrade?
For his part, the director of Health Insurance, Thomas Fatôme, assures that the general practitioners will be well upgraded within the framework of the conventional negotiation which must resume “from the beginning of next week” to be completed before the end of February.
But an amount of “50 euros would be relatively extravagant”, he says.
After a first strike in early December, this collective launched on Facebook (16,000 members) called for the closure of medical practices after Christmas, a movement extended until January 8. He says that 70% of general practitioners were on strike last week, Health Insurance estimating for its part the drop in activity at 10%.
