The lengthening of the internship pushes medical students into the streets

They don’t want to be forced to do a fourth year of internship in a medical desert. Several hundred medical students demonstrated this Wednesday in Toulouse their opposition to this provision provided for in the Social Security financing bill (PLFSS). The latter was adopted by the National Assembly and will soon be examined in the Senate.

“No, no, no to coercion”, chanted the Toulouse procession also opposed to another measure aimed at prohibiting them from exercising as temporary workers upon leaving their studies.

“It’s the door open to other coercive measures,” judge Sohan Annoussamy, third-year medical student and co-organizer of the event. “The pedagogical argument of the fourth year does not hold because it will not be well supervised”, he believes, fearing the lack of internship supervisors. For him, there are too few doctors throughout the territory and this measure would be “counter-productive”. “Because of this fourth year, there are students who will not go to general medicine,” he warns.

Yes in the countryside but not in these conditions

“We don’t mind doing one more year and going to the countryside, but in these conditions we will be poorly trained and it will be dangerous for the patients”, explains Aïda Ghallab, 24, a student in sixth year of medicine. “A patient in the Creuse will for example have a young doctor for a year, who will leave, come back and change, so there will be no follow-up possible”, she judges.

If the students say they want measures to facilitate in particular the realization of internships in under-resourced areas, they refuse to overcome the failures of the health system alone.