“We must put an end to inequalities in access to care for hospitalized people”

2023-07-13 17:00:05

We, health professionals and actors in the field, note the major health inequalities between the general population and people with mental disorders. While the pandemic has had a major impact on the mental health of the French, it is urgent to act.

Did you know that people with severe mental disorders can lose up to twenty years of life expectancy compared to the rest of the population? The reason: poor management of their general medical pathologies. Whether in terms of screening, access to care or the quality of the care delivered, people hospitalized in psychiatric establishments are disadvantaged. Well before the consequences of their psychiatric pathologies, it is cardiovascular diseases and cancers that are, in reality, the leading causes of death in these patients.

In question, chronic underfunding in psychiatry leading to exercise with insufficient material and human resources, and without access to innovative treatments, medicinal, psychotherapeutic or related to digital technology. We see on a daily basis that these disparities also come from the mode of financing in public psychiatric establishments.

Ceiling the far

In these structures, drugs and other health products must be financed within a constrained budgetary envelope set each year – the overall operating grant. This budget cannot be exceeded, regardless of the processing needs actually observed. The system establishes a glass ceiling structurally limiting access to medical care for these patients.

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However, with the same medical pathologies but without psychiatric disorders, they would be cared for in general hospitals without the same financial constraint. What’s more, the decree of March 1, 2022 reminds us: unlike public psychiatric establishments, in private psychiatric hospitals, all treatments that are not related to the psychiatric pathology for which the patient is hospitalized can be covered directly by the Insurance -disease.

People treated in the private sector are not likely to see their access to medicines restricted by the funding constraints of the hospital, when those hospitalized in the public service are deprived of many treatments, in particular the most innovative, which are also often the most expensive. It is an unjustifiable loss of chances and life expectancy when you know that any other French citizen has guaranteed access to these treatments.

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