LE VIGAN, France — Doctors in the small French town of Le Vigan are getting older.
In a bid to attract new GPs to replace the three retiring soon, they built — from the ground up — an interdisciplinary medical center, the model having been touted as a way to make general practice more attractive to young doctors.
The trouble is, it’s not working.
In five years of searching for replacements, not a single person has come forward.
“I didn’t think there would be such a disavowal of rural medicine,” said Antoine Brun d’Arre, 59, one of the local GPs who set up the center.
And so, despite all their efforts to prevent it, the town in southern France will likely become another of the country’s so-called medical deserts.
Le Vigan, which has a population of about 4,000 and nestles in a valley at the southern end of the Massif Central, is not the only French town struggling to attract doctors. But the scale of the challenges it faces is emblematic of a Europe-wide crisis in which doctors are too far, too few or too old.
Nearly 7 million people in France don’t have a referring GP. Geographically, 30 percent of the country’s population lives in a region with poor access to GPs, said Guillaume Chevillard, health geographer and research fellow at the Institute for Research and Information in Health Economics.
