Foreign-Trained Doctors on COVID-19 Frontlines Push for Full Integration in French Healthcare System

"In this time of pandemic that mobilizes all the forces and skills in the country, some are engaged selflessly in the most exposed emergency positions and in the intensive care units. Among them, a large number are doctors with precarious status who, with their colleagues, maintain the operation of the hospital service in the storm and save lives under difficult material conditions, but also perilous for themselves," the letter states.

The fifteen signatories of the letter explain that a recent report at the Delafontaine hospital in Saint-Denis clearly showed how this hospital could not fulfill its mission without them. But this is also the case in many hospitals and many departments. They claim that these "precarious status" doctors are by their side in a period where all caregivers risk their lives every day in the service of France. For them, their courage must not remain without recognition from the nation.

That is why, out of a sense of justice, they are calling for the immediate full and complete integration into the health system of all these practitioners, so that their dedication is not obscured, as has been the case in certain periods in the country’s history. "They will be able to continue their mission in the service of the sick, once the pandemic has passed, as all the caregivers do today," Michel Cymes, Bernard Kouchner and the other signatories of the letter are convinced.