Assistants employed to ease medical deserts in France
Role is intended to help free up GP time so they can treat more patients
Assistants deliver basic medical care such as taking blood pressure readings
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Specially-trained assistants are being increasingly employed to help free up doctors’ time so they can see more patients.
The job of an assistant médical is to work closely with GPs or specialist doctors on both administrative tasks and basic patient care, for example taking blood pressure.
“The role was created to ease the pressure caused by a stagnation in the number of doctors combined with an ageing population requiring more care,” Emmanuel Frère-Lecoutre, director of care at the Caisse nationale de l’assurance maladie, told The Connexion.
“The role frees up time for the doctors and allows them to focus as much as possible on medical activity.”
Read more: French town opens medical centre for those without a GP
How many medical assistants have are there?
More than 6,700 medical assistant contracts have been signed since 2019 when the new role was created.
The majority (over 50%) of these were previously medical secretaries who have undertaken the necessary training, which takes around eight months to complete.
Doctors who have hired medical assistants have recorded a 9.9% increase in the number of patients taken on, a 5.6% increase in patients seen over the course of the year and 8.7% more medical procedures performed each day, 30 months after hiring them.
Assurance maladie reimburses up to 50% of the medical assistant’s salary, but the financial aid is only given if the number of patients and medical care is increasing.
“It is too early to say if the quality of medical care is increasing but the quality of life of doctors has significantly improved,” said Mr Frère-Lecoutre.
“The role has progressed well and we aim to reach 10,000 contracts signed by 2025.”
The number of doctors in France increased slightly between 2023 and 2024, but regional disparities have also grown, and pressure on medical supply remains a major problem, both today and for the future.
France’s population continues to age, with 26.6% people above the age of 60 in 2021.
Some 77% of French residents have difficulties booking appointments with specialists and 58% have given up or postponed healthcare due to a lack of doctors, according to recent surveys.
Read more: What is being done to tackle France’s shortage of dermatologists?
How many more doctors are there in France now?
There were 3,272 more doctors on January 1, 2024 than the previous year, according to the Conseil national de l‘Ordre des médecins, a marginal increase of 1.4%, although numbers are expected “to rise gradually for a few years and then significantly after that”.
There have also been improvements bringing the average age of doctors down – it is now 48.1 years as opposed to 50.2 in 2010.
The number of female doctors is up to 51.8% from 40% in 2010.
However, the increase in doctors was mostly in university hospitals, while rural regions are seeing a decrease in the number of medical practitioners, combined with a growing average age.
Generally speaking, the north of France is more affected by this disparity, although there are also stark contrasts between the number of general practitioners and specialists.
For example, in the Paris area, there is an extremely high density of specialists, while patients find it a lot harder to sign up to a new GP or have an ordinary appointment.
Though it has a slightly higher density of doctors compared to the UK, France has a considerably lower density than Spain, Italy and Germany, according to OECD figures.
“Access to healthcare has long been seen as an essential priority, but one for which no satisfactory solution has yet been found,” the Conseil national de l'Ordre des médecins stated in a press release.
New prime minister Michel Barnier has described medical deserts as one of his “executive’s priorities”.
One idea is to encourage retired doctors to resume practising through a “favourable combination of salary and pension”.
This is not a new idea and the president of independent doctors' union UFML, Jérôme Marty, qualified it as putting “a bit of plaster on an open wound”.
