“Diary of a city doctor” on Arte: a worrying inventory of the health system – Le Monde

ARTE – WEDNESDAY AUGUST 25 AT 11:05 PM – DOCUMENTARY

Retirement is approaching for Jean-Paul Mesdom, general practitioner in Romainville (Seine-Saint-Denis). In his office, installed in a small pavilion, with a mischievous eye, lively humor and communicative empathy, this old-fashioned doctor has been receiving patients for more than three decades, most of them without an appointment. A large, loyal clientele, often economically disadvantaged.

This moving documentary was born from a will: that of Nicolas Mesdom, the son of this endearing doctor. After long negotiations with his father, he got what he wanted. Alone with his camera, he was able to film for seven months the daily life of his soon retired father in the privacy of his office, or during home visits to fragile patients.

Through this project, Nicolas Mesdom wanted to both discover what had been going on for so long behind the closed doors of this practice but also to highlight the human commitment of his father, faced, like many city doctors, with the medical desertification affecting lower-income neighborhoods.

Listening quality

Beyond the disturbing or comical face-to-face between this attentive listening doctor and sometimes difficult patients, the documentary outlines a worrying state of affairs in the health system: an increasingly alarming shortage of an offer of Proximity care, sometimes dramatic errors of judgment of overwhelmed emergency services which release into the nature of patients requiring care, everything is approached with frankness.

And also the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of finding such a motivated replacement. “Taking a patient between two appointments, as I have constantly done, it’s over”, observes, lucidly, Doctor Mesdom who adds, a bit fatalistic: “We can no longer continue to have permanent care like this. Everyone has to go gradually by appointment. The door closes for people who are a little lost… ”

From start to finish of this remarkable documentary, the listening quality of Doctor Mesdom is present. The experienced man with firmly anchored social convictions knows how to comfort but also to shake up when necessary. Faced with tears, neuroses, anxieties, sometimes pathetic requests for drugs whose side effects are not trivial or descriptions of scandalous working conditions of one of his patients, Dr. Mesdom finds the right words.

As comfortable with adults as with adolescents, with the timid as with the disturbed, this amazing doctor represents a noble idea of ​​medical practice. When it comes to the last appointments before his retirement, many patients are teary-eyed. A word of thanks, a hug, the sadness assumed to no longer be treated by such a character, nothing is trivial.