Faced with the tension in hospitals due to the lack of caregivers, Anne Hidalgo is considering major means.
"We must completely blow up the numerus clausus which prevents us from recruiting doctors in particular," the mayor of Paris said on BFM on Thursday, referring to this selection system limiting the number of places in the second year of health studies .
"There are many young people in France who have this vocation but who cannot access this medical career and who go to Belgium or Romania to train when there is a lack of doctors", added the candidate to the presidential.
Lack of personnel in hospitals: Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) proposes to "blow up the idea of the numerus clausus" pic.twitter.com/4b4s44bUre
- BFMTV (@BFMTV) October 28, 2021
The much-maligned Numerus clausus takes the form of a very difficult MCQ (multiple choice questionnaire) that must be passed to pass to second year.
Created in the 1970s to regulate medical demography, the numerus clausus reached its lowest level in the 1990s: less than 4,000 doctors were then trained each year.
In 2018, despite a slight relaxation, only 13,523 places were available in the second year, including 8,205 in medicine, for 59,753 first year students (called Paces).
Recruitment issues
The current government has in fact already removed the numerus clausus with its reform of health studies aimed at increasing the number of trained doctors by 20%, diversifying the profiles of caregivers and allowing dropouts to bounce back to other horizons. Entered into force in 2020, the reform however gave rise to an equally difficult and selective competition as before, according to many students. In the end and despite the reform, only 9,361 first year students were allowed to continue their health studies in 2020, according to figures in the official journal. Worse, in 2021, the number of students admitted to the second year did not exceed 6,500, according to the Official Journal.
"We should train 15,000 doctors per year in France, we train less than 10,000 today," said the current mayor of Paris at the microphone of RMC. Anne Hidalgo therefore proposes to put an end to this drastic selection to remedy the lack of caregivers in hospitals. A survey conducted by Jean-François Delfraissy, president of the scientific council and of the National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE), revealed Wednesday, October 27 that 20% of beds are currently unavailable at the hospital for lack of caregivers exhausted by the health crisis.
A situation that Dr. Patrick Goldstein, head of emergency at the Lille University Hospital and boss of the Samu du Nord explains by a "massive discomfort, a demotivation" which causes these serial departures of caregivers but also recruitment difficulties.
On Wednesday, Gabriel Attal also admitted that there were "recruitment problems" of caregivers.