"Wasted medical time": Doctors are fed up with 2 million "absurd" medical certificates

In Lille, in the North, a rather unusual stamp adorns a general practitioner's office. Jean-Philippe Platel, president of the Northern Medical Association, says he often uses it when faced with what he calls " absurd certificates ."

"For example, for school absences that do not require a certificate, middle and high schools have hijacked the system by saying 'we don't require papers for school, but for the cafeteria.' This is French hyper-administration taken to the extreme," the doctor denounced to BFMTV.

Health professionals are also targeting certificates requested by sports clubs, insurance companies or employers for sick leave during the waiting period, even though the worker is not paid in any case.

"These are consultations that should not be honored and reimbursed (by health insurance, editor's note) because it is not care, it is prevention," he said.

These procedures, according to doctors, are clogging up their surgeries. "It's a problem for patients because they're going to turn away other people," warns Mickael Rochoy, a general practitioner in Outreau (Pas-de-Calais).

"If people have already had the experience (...) of calling five to 20 doctors and having received so many refusals, the situation is also linked to these absurd certificate problems which mean that we have wasted medical time which could be used for patients," explains the general practitioner.

The latter estimates that each year in France, around 2 million consultations relate to a certificate deemed absurd.