“Minister of Health, it’s a full-time job!” : professionals disappointed to be drowned in a mega social ministry

While Health is a major concern of the French, there is no longer a full-time Minister of Health... professionals in the sector are worried about finding themselves drowned in a mega social ministry with Labor and Solidarity, entrusted to Catherine Vautrin. Certainly, the former Minister of Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher will be appointed Minister Delegate for Health and will assist Catherine Vautrin on this sensitive issue. HEC, enarque, Agnès Panier-Runacher, who has built a reputation for seriousness on industrial and energy issues, is not completely foreign to health issues. In the 2000s, she served as chief of staff to Rose-Marie Van Lerberghe, then general director of Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) and was specifically responsible for the implementation of the 2007 hospital plan. .

But the world of health does not hide its disappointment and its concern, fearing that the integration of the health system within such a large ministry will cause its specificities to be forgotten. And this, even if Health, in a tight team, moves up in the protocol order of the government to third place, just behind Bruno Le Maire (Economy, Finance, Industrial and Digital Sovereignty) and Gérald Darmanin (Interior and Overseas ). However, experience has shown the limits of a juggernaut ministry. In her Journal published in October, the former Minister of Health and Solidarity Agnès Buzyn testifies to her impossible agenda, caught between thousands of fires, forced in the middle of the Covid storm, to manage the hospital strike and the emergency crisis, while negotiating at the same time the pension reform with the social partners and by defending the bioethics law in the Assembly... “I am a hospital doctor, I have worked hundreds of shifts in my life, I am used to working a lot. But I want to re-establish with public opinion, which often sees the life of a minister as a worldly job, that there is a lot of work,” she confided to Le Figaro.

“Minister of Health is a full-time job,” emphasizes the young doctors’ union Reagjir. “Only a comprehensive and ambitious plan for community medicine and, more broadly, the health system will make it possible to change the situation,” say the young doctors, who are calling for a “new deal.” “We will remain extremely vigilant so that Health has a priority and central place in this major ministry,” cautiously advances Franck Devulder, president of the CSMF doctors’ union. A good player, Arnaud Robinet, mayor (Horizons) of Reims and president of the French hospital federation (FHF) - whose name was circulating for the Ministry of Health - said he saw this as a sign that the issues of health and autonomy “will be the subject of reinforced political support and a high priority”.

More critically, the union of hospital practitioners APH does not mince its words. “While the Prime Minister committed, during the transfer of power, to act to “strengthen our public services […], health, and first of all, the hospital”… Health finds itself in extremis integrated into the middle of a large ministry which will combine work, health and solidarity, entrusted to a minister whose professional and political career has never crossed the health system", he regrets. As for the UFML-S union, it directly interprets this double appointment of political leaders with careers marked by responsibilities around the economy, industry or business as “a strengthening of the supervision of Bercy, with Bruno Lemaire appearing too much like the real Minister of Health.”

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It must be said that Catherine Vautrin is the seventh Minister of Health since 2017. After three doctors (Agnès Buzyn, Olivier Véran, François Braun), a medical secretary (Brigitte Bourguignon), a former history teacher (Aurélien Rousseau), and a pharmacist (Agnès Firmin-le-Bodo), it is therefore pure politics which this time takes the reins of avenue de Ségur. And this while the world of health is going through a deep and lasting crisis, faced with the shortage of doctors, the emergency crisis, the hospital deficit, the soaring Social Security gap or even the lack of recognition of medicine. city ​​in the middle of conventional negotiations.