According to figures from the 2024 edition of the Atlas of Medical Demography published Wednesday by the Order of Physicians, the number of doctors in regular activity (excluding replacements and active retirees) in France increased by 0.8% to 199 089 practitioners as of January 1, 2024. This number has been declining since 2010, with the exception of timid rebounds in 2018 and 2020, and is now returning to a level comparable to that observed in 2014.
“There is a tremor in medical demographics,” commented Doctor Jean-Marcel Mourgues, vice-president of the national council of the Order of Physicians. “Regularly active doctors are finally increasing. Not much, but they are increasing.” For him, their workforce is now “on a plateau with a slight rise. This trend is expected to continue and even increase in the years to come.”
Small drop in average age
Another rather encouraging signal from a demographic point of view, the average age of doctors continues to fall, to 48.1 years compared to 48.6 last year for doctors in regular practice.
Medical density – the number of doctors per 100,000 inhabitants – increases very slightly, to 296.4 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 294.7 last year. But this raw density should be taken with a grain of salt, because the population is aging and its need for care is increasing, recalls Doctor Mourgues.
In standardized medical density, which takes into account the aging of the population, “I think we are on a plateau”, which “should remain the mark of the decade 2020 to 2030”, he believes. “Afterwards, it is likely that from 2030”, the standardized medical density “will initially increase slowly, then more and more quickly”, with significant benefits for the population.
Medical demography has suffered for several years from the effects of the numerus clausus, a policy of controlling the number of medical students that began in the 1970s and which peaked in the 1990s, with only 3,500 students trained each year.
The quota was first loosened from the end of the 1990s (reaching 7,000 at the turn of the 2010s), then abolished under President Emmanuel Macron. The number of students trained today reaches 11,000 (number of second year medical students), and should reach 12,000 in 2025.
Medical deserts
On the other hand, other signals are not likely to reassure the inhabitants of medical deserts. “Territorial inequalities are growing ever wider,” notes Doctor Mourgues. “Departments that have university hospitals, with rare exceptions, tend to increase and rejuvenate their medical population.”
On the other hand, “there are departments rather on the outskirts of the region, often with a rural profile and an elderly population – an aggravating factor for the provision of care – which has a medical population which continues to age and which is not getting younger enough “.
According to the Atlas, it is thus “the departments located in the center of the metropolis, around the Paris basin, which are the least well endowed”, such as Indre (145.9 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants), Eure ( 147.4) or Cher (152.2). “Conversely, the departments housing the large cities of France, as well as those located on the coasts or on the borders have the highest densities: Paris (697.4), Hautes-Alpes (432.4) or even the Rhône (414).
