"This is a first step," says GPs deployed in September to 151 red zones to combat medical deserts.

With this map, which identifies 151 priority inter-municipalities for access to care, "we are not solving medical deserts" since they affect "87% of the country," the minister indicated in an interview on BFMTV, but "it is a first step" that will benefit more than 2.5 million patients, he specified.

This division is the result of work "carried out with prefects, regional health agencies, local elected officials, and also health professionals, to identify particularly deprived areas," he explained.

According to him, it allows us to "identify and provoke collective solidarity in these territories, a collective commitment on September 1st."

On April 25, a government measure was adopted to establish a "mandatory territorial solidarity mission," requiring all doctors practicing in well-served areas to "project" themselves into priority areas for up to two days per month.

"We're going to encourage doctors, and then we also need to fine-tune the system, find the places, the medical centers, the offices that are available to accommodate patients," said Mr. Neuder.

"Pending the adoption of the legislative provisions currently being examined by Parliament, this measure will allow all volunteer general practitioners to come and strengthen, for part of their time, the provision of care in 151 so-called 'red zones'," the Ministry of Health's press release reads.

"Volunteers"

The word "volunteers" is important for doctors, because François Bayrou's entourage mentioned at the end of April financial compensation for practitioners who leave, while "doctors who refuse would be penalized."

"It must not be the idea of ​​constraint, of obligation," Agnès Giannotti, president of Médecins Généralistes (MG France, the majority among liberals), insisted to AFP at the end of April.

"These maps also allow us to work on the locations where 3,700 junior doctors, new doctors" who "will not arrive until November 2026," Mr. Neuder explained on BFMTV.

Unsurprisingly, central France and the southwest, excluding the coast, have the most red zones on the ministry's map.

"The departments in the center of the metropolis are the most affected" by the low medical density, the Order of Physicians already noted in March in its 2025 atlas of medical demography in France.

"For surgical specialists and practicing medical specialists, a diagonal from the northeast to the southwest of France" is emerging for low medical densities, the Order continued.

Overseas, it is again unsurprising that Guyana and Mayotte are the worst off.

Faced with a shortage of doctors, a reform of access to the second year of medicine was adopted on June 18 to enable the training of more professionals.

The government also intends to "recover French students who have gone abroad, to Romania and Spain" to study medicine, Mr. Neuder recalled, thus predicting "more than 20% of doctors by 2027, or nearly 50,000 doctors."