Aisha S, an anaesthetist in Marseille’s public hospital system, said, ‘I try not to dwell on what I’ve been through.’ Like the other doctors I interviewed, she requested anonymity. She had worked for ten years in Algeria before joining her husband in France in 2006. Once there, it took her 16 years to get her degree recognised.

Of the 234,028 doctors working in France on 1 January 2023, 29,238 held non-French degrees, according to the registry of the Ordre des Médecins (CNOM). This is double the number in 2010 and includes 16,346 with diplomas from outside Europe. Of these, the largest proportion (37%) come from Algeria; most others are from Tunisia, Morocco or Syria. They are sought after by institutions, especially outside of large cities, that struggle to hire in fields where self-employed doctors earn more (such as anaesthesia) or that are demanding or undervalued (like emergency medicine or psychiatry). In addition to these practitioners, who have managed to get their foreign training recognised, there are thousands with non-EU degrees (PADHUEs) who cannot register with CNOM and are hired under precarious statuses: intern, FFI (Serving as Intern) or associate practitioner.

These doctors’ experience is tightly interwoven with the history of French public hospitals, which became cutting-edge facilities only after the second world war when spending skyrocketed and there was a surge in doctors, as well as university students. According to researcher Marc-Olivier Déplaude, the CNOM’s conservative fringe, outraged by the May 1968 student uprising, claimed that ‘a primary cause [of the unrest] was the increasing number of students ‒ now including some from poorer backgrounds’.

In 1971 an admissions limit was imposed on second-year medical students via a competitive exam, after lobbying by the medical association and trade unions. ‘Then the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 triggered an economic one, with double-digit inflation, and doctors started fearing for (…)

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