Has the diffusion of primary care teams in France improved attraction and retention of general practitioners in rural areas?

Guillaume Chevillard, Julien Mousquès (), Véronique Lucas-Gabrielli and Stéphane Rican

Health Policy, 2019, vol. 123, issue 5, 508-515

Abstract: Many countries, including France, are facing the old and persistent problem of geographical inequalities of their health human resources, in particular general practitioners (GPs). This situation leads, among other things, to underserved areas, which could result in a lower level of primary health care accessibility. Since the mid-2000s in France, several policies were implemented to provide financial as well as other incentives to support the development of multi-professional group practices, Primary Care Teams (PCTs), in order to attract and retain GPs in underserved areas. This study aims to measure the impact of PCTs settlement on the evolution of GP density in rural areas. To this end, we compare the evolution of GP density between rural areas with PCTs and similar rural areas without PCTs, before (2004–2008) and after (2008–2012) the development of PCTs facilities. The results show that PCTs are mainly located in underserved areas and suggest that they could attract and retain GPs there. Those results should be of interest to countries facing relatively similar geographical inequalities issues and that are also experimenting with multi-professional group practices.

Keywords: Attraction and retention; France; General practitioner; Geographical inequalities; Multi-professional group practice; Public policies; Rural underserved areas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016885101930048X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:123:y:2019:i:5:p:508-515

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.03.002

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().