Question 15073 — medicine

Summary

Mr. Édouard Bénard draws the attention of the Minister of Health, Families, Autonomy and Persons with Disabilities to the worrying shortage of dermatologists throughout the territory. Dermatology constitutes an essential specialty, both for the diagnosis and for the monitoring of numerous pathologies, ranging from common skin conditions to more serious diseases, such as skin cancers. But many territories are today faced with a shortage of dermatology care. In 2025, the departments of Ariège, Indre, Lozère and Nièvre simply no longer had a dermatologist. France has lost nearly 1,000 dermatologists in less than ten years and today has only 2,928 for 68 million inhabitants. Even more worrying, 50% of currently practicing dermatologists have more than 60 years old, including 17% of them who are already in a combined employment-retirement situation. According to the president of the French Society of Dermatology, 30% of dermatologists who will retire in the coming years should not be replaced. She adds that the number of young dermatologists currently in training - 102 places open in this specialty in 2025, while between 125 and 130 are needed - is insufficient to compensate for future departures. This shortage of professionals results in particularly long appointment times, which can reach several months, or even more than a year in certain cases. It also leads to forgoing care, particularly for the most fragile or least mobile patients, forced to travel long distances to consult a specialist. These difficulties are all the more worrying that late diagnosis can have serious consequences, particularly in the case of skin cancers. Furthermore, the territorial distribution of dermatologists, as for many medical specialties, remains particularly unequal. In this context of shortage expected to worsen in the coming years, the development of aesthetic care activities, to the detriment of medical care, is increasingly scandalizing patients seeking a dermatologist for health reasons. In a survey conducted in 2024, the National Union of Dermatologists-Venereologists indicated that 10.9% of dermatologists would devote more than 30% of their activity to aesthetic care, that two thirds of specialists would devote less than 10% of their activity to it and that 34.14% of them would devote themselves exclusively to medical care. While some patients express great difficulties in ensuring the monitoring, control and treatment of their pathology, due to a lack of available professionals, they rightly rebel against the development of more remunerative activities, linked to aesthetic treatments (injections of hyaluronic acid or botulinum toxin, laser hair removal, tattoo removal), favored by certain professionals who accept these appointment requests more quickly, detriment of medical consultations. Although several avenues have already been mentioned, such as the development of telemedicine, the use of tele-expertise or even better coordination between general practitioners and specialists, these cannot constitute, on their own, a sufficient response to the current shortage of specialists. In this context, he asks him to please specify the measures that the Government intends to take action to remedy the shortage of dermatologists, improve access times to consultations and guarantee better territorial distribution of this specialty. Along the same lines, he would like to know if the Government intends to regulate and limit acts relating to aesthetic care, in order to concentrate the activity of dermatologists on the provision of medical care.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

Timeline

No timeline events have been ingested for this record yet.

Votes

No vote records are attached yet.

Versions

No version snapshots stored. Document URLs remain at the source.

Documents

No documents linked.

Sponsors

No sponsors or actors listed by the source.

Related records

No cross-record relationships stored yet.