Not only because its imposing stature will fade but because this departure further exaggerates the medical desert which is eating into canton after canton (1). “I am not the good Lord,” breathes this son of a country doctor to sum up “in bulk” all the feelings that are going through him a few weeks before an outcome that he fears as much as the inhabitants of the area.
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” No vacation “
“When I set up, even though we were six general practitioners in the sector, and we worked well. Today I am alone,” says Xavier Rucquois, who considers himself “working the old-fashioned way”: “I make home visits, I sometimes work up to a hundred hours a week, I almost never take a vacation. In short, who would like to replace me? »
His patient base is 1,500 registered, people for whom he is officially the treating doctor, and also 1,500 others, more occasional. “If my case were isolated, we could be reassured. But I am putting here some figures that everyone knows: there are five of us general practitioners leaving in the coming months, coming years, in our corner of Charente limousine and 45 in Charente. »
“Swiss knives”
The general practitioner puts forward a rather pessimistic diagnosis of general medicine: “We have gradually become Swiss army knives, assigned to our practice, to emergencies, but also to tasks that consume a lot of time: accounting, administrative, social, medico-social, monitoring of chronically ill patients…”
I’m not here to pick up what others don’t want to do.
Xavier Rucquois elaborates: “There have never been so many doctors in France, but there are fewer and fewer general practitioners. There are very noticeable changes. We are seeing doctors appear who no longer want to monitor patients, and therefore become treating doctors, refuse home visits and are reluctant to take on call. They want to work à la carte and we offer them golden bridges for that. »
We are going to lose people through lack of care.
It is this context, like the creation of salaried employment for certain general practitioners, which pushes him to say stop: “Sorry, but I’m not here to pick up what others don’t want to do. The average number of procedures performed by a general practitioner in our countryside is 5,000 procedures per year, while an employed doctor is 2,800. And he sometimes earns a better living…”
“Fragile” health homes
So is there a treatment for this very dark picture? “Groupings are a possible solution, health centers but it is also fragile. And if we take close examples, those of La Rochefoucauld or Roumazières, they are at saturation,” underlines the doctor who also wonders about unscheduled care centers, like the one recently opened in Chasseneuil.
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“The risk is to no longer follow our patients, to miss the right diagnosis. We know them, we know their story. A good portion of my patients are elderly people with long-term illnesses (ALD). Emergency medicine cannot suit them. We are going to lose people through lack of care. It’s a real waste of luck,” fears the general practitioner, who points out another difficulty: “Our digital isolation. In Massignac, for a month, we have no longer had fiber. How do we work, transmit, telephone? We also waste a lot of time there…”
Xavier Rucquois, who will remain living in Massignac, senses that a “function, that of general practitioner, will disappear. I’m stubborn, I held on as long as I could. But after ? » For several weeks, the doctor has been announcing to his patients that he will soon be leaving: “It’s very difficult, for them, as for me. »
(1) The medical center where he works, owned by the Charente Limousin community of communes, has two nurses and two osteopaths.
