Addressing Medical Deserts: Policies and Incentives for Rural Healthcare

Extract

[...] They can be distinguished between traditional policies and new policies that try to fill the gaps of the first ones. Among the incentive measures, that is, measures of aid to installation and financial compensation, we can count the policies of medical attractiveness. Traditionally, this took the form of a policy of immigration of foreign doctors on French territory. If the positive effects were real, they did not last in the long term. More recently, policies launched by the State have aimed to create 200 'general medicine territorial practitioners' who are helped through a supplement to their income but also more social protection. [...]

[...] In this sense, the fight against medical deserts has manifested itself as a battle for the maintenance of public services. On the other hand, this fight aims to concretize the real equality of access to public services that exists in the law. If this fight has developed with the contemporary trends of desertification and rural exodus, it can also be explained by the aging of the general population. This 'intolerable health fracture' (document highlights the constant distancing of both rural and urban populations from specialists for both geographical and financial reasons. [...]

[...] Document 4 even suggests that the evolution of the medical desert now affects territories such as Paris or Cannes. Question 2 : It is only possible to note the gap between the production of incentive measures, aimed at attracting young doctors to rural or difficult areas, and the advancement of the medical desert. This means that, despite the incentive measures, it is not possible to fill the difficulties of integration. This has become a real public problem as this question affects more and more territories and whose roots are becoming increasingly deep-rooted. [...]

[...] These policies follow the incentives that have long guided public action without achieving the expected results. However, the 'stick policy' often praised is subject to many difficulties in implementation and sometimes disappointing results. It is then a matter of putting in place measures such as the obligation for new doctors to work in small hospitals or modifying the mode of convention. In fact, senators have proposed reducing the reimbursement at social tariff for doctors who decided to settle in areas with already very high medical density (such as the center of Paris or the PACA region). [...]