Delphine Schiltz, edited by Juliette Moreau Alvarez
06:24, November 04, 2022modified to
2:47 p.m., November 04, 2022
After having had several rabbits placed, the doctors sounded the alarm. For them, too many appointments made in their offices are not honored and this would represent a little over 76,000 appointments per day. Each year, the figure is colossal: 28 million medical appointments are not honored by patients. Per day, this amounts to making 4,000 doctors unavailable, warns the French Union for Free Medicine (UFML).
The phenomenon is not new but it has increased with the development of platforms like Doctolib and the Covid crisis. Some irritated doctors want to take action. Specialists are particularly concerned by the phenomenon. Dorothée Douchement, ENT doctor, is dismayed. On average, it has suffered an average of 29 rabbits since the beginning of the year. “It’s huge,” she regrets. “And I find myself turning away patients in the morning, sometimes patients I’ve been on for a long time, emergency patients, because my appointment book is full. And finally I find myself waiting for a patient who doesn’t come” , says Dorothée Douchement.
Sometimes the specialist contacts her patients to find out why they did not show up for the appointment. The list of reasons is long, and certain behaviors distress him: “Some people tell me that the weather is nice and that they preferred to go to the sea, others that they have other things to do” , she lists. “We wonder if we live on the same planet,” she laments when she notices a waiting period of at least four months for an appointment in her office.
A call to sanction appointments not honored
“Health has become a good that we consume. Me, it shocks me terribly”, indignantly the doctor. To fight against this scourge, the UFML wishes to attack the wallets of those who do not bother to cancel. Jérôme Marty, its president, details the terms.
As a first step, the public health code should be modified, which currently prevents billing for an appointment that is not honored: “What is possible is that we set up a system for reporting to the insurance health insurance. From there, the health insurance could take a sum ‘from the person’s account’, during his next consultation. This sum could be 4, 5 or 10 euros”, suggests Jérôme Marty. Another proposal provides that these sums collected compensate doctors or feed a fund to fight against medical deserts.
Source: Europe1
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