the essential
The Jean Jaurès foundation has published a survey detailing the waiting time before being seen by your general practitioner, pediatrician, dentist and other specialties in each department of France. In Aude, finding a cardiologist, an ophthalmologist or a dermatologist varies between 2 and 3 months, too long a prospect in a territory strongly impacted by medical deserts.
How long does it take you to find an appointment with a healthcare professional in Aude? This is the question asked by the Jean Jaurès foundation which has broken down the waiting time to consult in seven categories – general practitioners, pediatricians, dentists, midwives, cardiologists, gynecologists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists and psychiatrists. To carry out this investigation, the institute reported data from Doctolib, the application for finding an appointment. These statistics bring together more than 200,000 million appointments in France over the past year (2023) and compared to the three previous ones.
4 to 5 days to have an appointment with your general practitioner
In these, deadlines in the department vary depending on the specialty sought. Take for example general practitioners, who are always in high demand from patients. Like our neighbors in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the average is 4 to 5 days to benefit from a consultation. This is the lowest expectation for the department in all categories. But for all that, Aude is not in the national average, according to the Nîmes cardiologist who worked on the survey for the Occitanie region, Marc Villaceque: “The average wait is 3 days in France. We do this based on urgent appointments and chronic illness.” Another observation, to support his point, the practitioner notes inequalities in the distribution of Aude doctors. “According to the work that we have carried out, the doctors are more towards the Mediterranean. But we did not carry out this study by taking the living areas on a case-by-case basis”he adds, noting that generalists remain better distributed than specialists.
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Long wait to find a dermatologist
And this study reinforces the department’s distress in the face of medical deserts. Aude experiences a very long delay in certain specialties, particularly in finding a cardiologist: between 2 and 3 months. A wait above neighboring territories such as the Pyrénées-Orientales and Hérault, according to the Jean-Jaurès foundation, which varies between 1 and 2 months. “The national average is 42 days, it’s a little lower but compared to the previous three years, it’s only this specificity that takes you back to find an appointment. If you have a symptom you can be caught between 24 or even 48 hours”analyzes the cardiologist.
The other difficulty for the department is to be examined by an ophthalmologist: between 1 and 2 months. But where the delay is the longest is finding a dermatologist. The department is one of the two territories, with Tarn, the most impacted: more than 3 months of waiting.
Pediatrician: in the low range
For its part, having an appointment with a pediatrician is in the low range. With a wait ranging from 1 to 7 days. In France, many areas have fewer than five pediatricians, so the waiting time is not listed. Concerning dentists, Aude is in line with neighboring departments. In other words, it is a period of between 15 days and 1 month.
Finally, to have an appointment with a midwife, patients must wait between 8 and 14 days, as for the Pyrénées-Orientales.
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