Medical Deserts: The Solution to a Fourth Year of Internship

François Braun, the Minister of Health, will propose, in the Social Security financing bill (PLFSS) for 2023, the addition of a fourth year of study for general medicine interns.

This will bring to ten years the duration of the training of a general practitioner: six years before the boarding school competition and four years afterwards.

This additional year will be carried out on an outpatient basis, under the supervision of trained liberal doctors, and encouraged to take place in medical deserts.

This measure will apply to the start of the 2023 academic year, i.e. for the promotion which will take the competition in June 2023 and will begin the internship five months later.

Access to care, a priority

Officially, the objective is to allow future doctors to benefit from a consolidation phase and more outpatient internships, which will allow them to more easily take the step of a liberal installation.

Some now prefer to start as substitutes for the time to familiarize themselves with practice in the office.

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Unofficially, this measure should make it possible to send young people to medical deserts.

François Braun has made access to care a priority when 10% of policyholders cannot find a general practitioner.

Paying for the inadequacy of public policies

Among students and their unions, the measure makes people cringe.

On the one hand, because it lengthens already very long studies.

On the other hand, because young people have the feeling of paying for the inadequacy of public policies, not without remembering that interns are students in training, not labor paid at a discount.

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“A real educational project will make it possible, during this additional year of internship, to support future doctors in a rapid installation”,

reassures the ministry.

To iron out the difficulties, a mission will be entrusted to a team made up of Pr Oustric (Council of the Order of Haute-Garonne), Dr Renker (Isnar-IMG union) and Pr Saint-Lary (National College of General Practitioners) .