France Seeks to Boost Recruitment of Moroccan Doctors Amid Healthcare Shortages

After having regularized the situation of non-European foreign doctors who practice in its hospitals and are not registered with the Order of Physicians, in particular the practitioners with diplomas from outside the European Union (more than 5,000 doctors) and who mostly come from North Africa, the French government is also planning to recruit practitioners in foreign countries, including Morocco. A mission that President Emmanuel Macron has entrusted to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, reports the daily Le Figaro. The latter will in turn appoint an envoy responsible for going abroad to recruit doctors to fill "the abysmal void" in emergency services.

According to the doctors’ unions and the management of the hospitals, the hospital centers have been filling the shortage of hospital staff by recruiting foreign doctors from outside the EU for 20 years. Among the 300,000 doctors registered with the Order, more than 25,000 of them are Europeans and non-Europeans. Their number has been constantly increasing since the Covid-19 pandemic. These doctors mostly assume the same missions as their European counterparts with short-term contracts and modest salaries, the unions say, calling on the French government to issue them with unrestricted practice authorizations based on the results of a selective competition called "knowledge verification tests (EVC)". "Without them, the health system will collapse," they assure.