France to fine patients who miss medical appointments
PARIS—France is to introduce a five euro ($5.50) penalty for people who fail to turn up for a doctor’s appointment, the prime minister said on Saturday.
The fine was one of the measures announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to boost a health service struggling to keep up with increasing demands from an aging and growing population.
“We cannot allow this,” Attal said of the 27 million consultations that the main doctors’ union says are wasted each year by patients not turning up.
He said a law allowing a “mechanism for responsibility” would be put to parliament and that the government wanted the penalty to start from Jan. 1.
The money would be paid by any person failing to turn up for an appointment or who gives less than 24 hours notice.
Individual doctors will decide if the reason for missing an appointment was good enough to avoid the financial penalty.
The prime minister will also seek to increase the number of students finishing high-pressure medical training in a bid to answer a critical shortage of doctors.
He said the number of students entering the second year of medical degrees would rise from 10,000 a year in 2023 to 12,000 in 2025 and 16,000 in 2027.
Medicine is considered one of the toughest university degrees in France with up to a third of students dropping out at the end of the first year. —AFP
