While health is a major concern for the French, there is no longer a full-fledged Minister of Health... professionals in the sector are worried about finding themselves drowning in a mega social ministry with work and solidarity, entrusted to Catherine Vautrin. Of course, the former Minister of Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher will be appointed Minister Delegate for Health and will assist Catherine Vautrin on this sensitive issue. Agnès Panier-Runacher, who has built a reputation for seriousness on industrial and energy issues, is no stranger to health issues. In the 2000s, she served as Chief of Staff to Rose-Marie Van Lerberghe, then Director General of the Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) and was specifically responsible for the implementation of the 2007 Hospital Plan.
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But the health sector does not hide its disappointment and concern, fearing that the integration of the health system within such a large ministry will make us forget the specificities of the latter. And this, even if Health, in a tight team, climbs in the government's protocol order to third place, just behind Bruno Le Maire (Economy, Finance, Industrial and Digital Sovereignty) and Gérald Darmanin (Interior and Overseas Territories). However, experience has shown the limits of a behemoth ministry. In her Journal published in October, the former Minister of Health and Solidarity Agnès Buzyn testifies to her impossible agenda, caught in the middle of a thousand fires, forced in the middle of the Covid storm, to manage the hospital strike and the emergency crisis, while at the same time negotiating the pension reform with the social partners and defending the bioethics law in the Assembly... "I'm a hospital doctor, I've done hundreds of shifts in my life, I'm used to working a lot. But I want to re-establish with public opinion, which often sees the life of a minister as a mundane job, that there is a lot of work," she told Le Figaro.
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Minister of Health is a full-time job," said the Reagjir Young Doctors' Union. "Only a comprehensive and ambitious plan for community medicine and, more broadly, the health system will make it possible to change the situation," say the young doctors, who are calling for a "new deal". "We will remain extremely vigilant to ensure that health has a priority and
central place in this major ministry," says Franck Devulder, president of the CSMF doctors' union. Arnaud Robinet, mayor (Horizons) of Reims and president of the hospital federation of France (FHF) - whose name was circulating for the Ministry of Health - said he saw it as a sign that the issues of health and autonomy "will be the subject of a reinforced political support and quite priority". More critically, the hospital practitioners' union APH does not mince its words. "While the Prime Minister pledged at the time of the transfer of power to act to 'strengthen our public services [...], health, and first and foremost, hospitals'... Health finds itself in extremis integrated into the middle of a large ministry that will combine work, health and solidarity, entrusted to a minister whose professional and political career has never crossed paths with the health system," he regrets.
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It must be said that Catherine Vautrin is the seventh Minister of Health since 2017. After three doctors (Agnès Buzyn, Olivier Véran, François Braun), a medical secretary (Brigitte Bourguignon), a former history teacher (Aurélien Rousseau), and a pharmacist (Agnès Firmin-le-Bodo), it is now pure politics that takes the reins of the Avenue de Ségur. And this at a time when the world of health is going through a deep and lasting crisis, confronted with the shortage of doctors, the crisis in emergency rooms, the deficit of hospitals, the soaring hole of the Social Security or the lack of recognition of community medicine in the midst of conventional negotiations.