“Too much aggression”. The fifteen practitioners of SOS Médecins in Saint-Étienne have decided to exercise their right of withdrawal until Monday morning after one of them was manhandled by a patient, we learned this Friday from the association, confirming information from Progrès.
Thursday evening, around 8:30 p.m., “a doctor at the Bellevue Consultation Center was threatened and pushed around by a patient to whom he had refused to renew a prescription for an analgesic whose use the doctor believed could be misused”, said Nacer Boukhezra, president of SOS Médecins Saint-Étienne, whose members intervene at home in this municipality and several neighboring municipalities.
“The patient got angry, he threatened the doctor and knocked over objects that were on his desk,” reported the police services dispatched to the scene.
“Regular incidents”
“In a context of shortage of doctors which generates recurring tensions, verbal violence and insults from increasingly demanding patients, it is too much aggression”, estimated Nacer Boukhezra, specifying that he acted as the “first exercise of the Saint-Etienne association’s right of withdrawal for this reason”.
“We regularly have this type of incident in consultation with degraded equipment, verbal aggression. We can’t go on like this. It is no longer possible”, regretted the practitioner who threatens not to resume his activity if the alleged aggressor is not punished.
He himself filed a complaint recently against a patient who had broken her phone after a prescription was refused. According to him, “across France, SOS Médecins has already recorded four or five physical attacks since the beginning of the year”. Another doctor from the association was assaulted in January in Toulon when leaving a consultation at night.
At the end of September, the practitioners of SOS Médecins went on strike to demand a reassessment of the price of their home visits. According to Le Progrès, they had finally obtained a reassessment of the price of their visits by four cents to cope with the soaring price of fuel.