€55,000 for young medics
The state is looking at a plan guaranteeing a good income to young doctors who move to ‘medical deserts’
YOUNG doctors could be offered a guaranteed income of €55,000 if they move to badly-served areas.
Health Minister Marisol Touraine, interviewed on the current affairs programme Zone Interdite on M6, said she was looking at the idea. The measure, which would be for the first two years to help doctors establish their practices, would act as a form of “insurance”, she said.
Whatever the doctors earned would be topped up, to €55,000.
Ms Touraine plans to offer 200 such “territorial practitioner” contracts next year. “They would be independent practitioners who would, after their training, go to work in an isolated problem area,” she said.
This comes as part of plans to offer a carrot rather than stick approach to the “medical deserts” problem; the growing lack of doctors in certain – often rural - parts of France, with doctors preferring to go to urban areas like Paris or the Côte d’Azur.
The problem is only set to get worse, with an ageing population of French doctors not being replaced by enough new trainees. In the Midi-Pyrénées, for example, a third of GPs (about 1,500 people) are over 60.
What is worse, few doctors now want to set up in independent practice – running their own business – instead, preferring the security of a hospital job or working as locums.
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