Question 8379 — pharmacy and medicines

Summary

Ms. Mathilde Feld alerts the Minister to the Minister of Labor, Health, Solidarity and Families, responsible for health and access to care, about the shortages of several psychotropic drugs and antidepressants currently affecting France. Patients and psychiatric professionals have been warning for many months about the growing shortage of psychotropic medications, such as the antidepressant Sertraline and the antipsychotic quetiapine. Psychiatric disorders are constantly increasing, particularly among young people (18-24 years old) for whom the prevalence of depressive episodes increased from 11.7% in 2017 to 20.8% in 2021, an increase of 77% in four years. Even though mental health has been declared a major national cause by the Government, it is clear that there is no questioning of public policies which lead to a reduction in allocations to psychiatric services. These tensions regarding supplies and uncertainty regarding the stability of their treatment plunge patients and those around them into situations of stress and anxiety that are all the more damaging given their state of health. In order to obtain the rare boxes available, patients, when they have the necessary means of mobility, are in the obligation to go to several pharmacies, which often requires reorganizing their daily lives. The MP was thus contacted by a resident of her constituency whose daughter suffering from deep depression had to travel more than 30 km to find the only box of Sertraline available in the area. This case is not isolated since several doctors from the Cadillac hospital center also reported the difficulties encountered by their patients in obtaining their treatment in pharmacies. The lack of supply of these treatments which nevertheless appear in the list of essential medicines of the ministry responsible for health finds, as often, a particular echo in rural areas, where pharmacies can be several tens of kilometers apart. While everyday transport is way continues to be underfunded, this means that it is absolutely necessary to be transported to be able to access treatment, thus creating a flagrant inequality of access to care. Here she echoes patients in her constituency and asks what measures will be taken to allow all patients to obtain these essential treatments and ensure real equality of access to care for all French people.

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.