PARIS (Dispatches) -- French
general practitioners have gone on strike for the second time this month as the country’s hospitals face a “triple epidemic” of Covid-19, bronchiolitis and flu.
The week-long walkout over consultation rates and working conditions follows a two-day strike on December 1 and 2 which saw activity in GP surgeries fall by 30 per cent, according to the French national health insurer.
Organizers are calling for the basic price of a medical consultation to be doubled from €25 to €50; the European average is €45. These fees are usually covered by medical insurance or the state so most patients would be sheltered from the extra cost.
They say this is the only way to retain young doctors — who are increasingly fleeing the profession — and combat “medical deserts”. The term is used in France to refer to areas where there are not enough doctors for the number of residents.
GPs are also protesting changes that will allow nurses to prescribe medication and provide certain treatments, saying that this will undermine their role.
The nationwide strike, the first since 2015, is unusual in both its length and scale, and it has attracted the support of both the left and far right. It has not been called by unions but by a new group called Doctors for Tomorrow, which claims to represent 16,000 practitioners.
Laurent Jacobelli, an MP for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, said it was “probably not the right moment for a strike” but that it was “never the right time to announce a strike, because this government has a problem with dialogue, negotiation, strategy and anticipation”.
Speaking on FranceInfo, he echoed voices on the left, accusing President Macron’s party of treating healthcare as a “cost, not an investment”. He added: “The government is watching the system sink but is doing nothing.”
It is the first time that many doctors will be closing their surgery doors. Pascal Charbonnel, a GP in Les Ulis, a suburb southwest of Paris, said he had never in his 35 years of practice gone on strike, but that this time things were different.
France is facing high numbers of coronavirus cases, while infants are being hit particularly hard this year by bronchiolitis and elderly people by influenza. This “triple epidemic” has placed an already stretched health system under extreme pressure.