55% of young veterinarians settled in France last year obtained their diploma outside France. For the most part, these are young French people who have gone to study in Belgium, Spain and Romania. This is one of the paradoxes of the situation of veterinary medicine in France: “There is a shortage of four to five hundred professionals each year”, deplores Jacques Bonin, the medical director of the network of Anicura clinics.
The formations have long remained blocked. “We have seen this phenomenon for about 20 years when there was a shortage of specialists in rural areas. Today, the shortage is such that farms are threatened by the lack of care, ”explains Philippe Choquet, director general of the UniLaSalle polytechnic institute in Beauvais (Oise), which has four campuses north of Paris.
new hospital
Very present in the training of engineers in the agricultural and environmental sectors, the private establishment has been nurturing the project of a veterinary school since 2008. “The situation was absurd. There was no school north of the capital, nor any private school unlike the engineering courses. We had to wait for the rural code to authorize the private sector to train veterinarians,” says Philippe Choquet. The rural code was modified in December 2020. “In the meantime, the shortage has become widespread. There are more pet owners in the city and the amount of care is increasing,” he continues.
At the start of the 2022 academic year, the UniLaSalle campus in Rouen (Seine-Maritime) welcomed its first hundred students, who will graduate as veterinarians in 2029. Then there will be 120 at the start of the next academic year, supervised by 150 employees, including 90 teacher-researchers . The associative establishment, recognized as being of general interest, is investing 50 million euros to build a veterinary care hospital on its Normandy site. The permit has just been filed, the establishment will be delivered in 2025.
In addition to the arrival of UniLaSalle, the four public schools, Maisons-Alfort (Val-de-Marne), Lyon, Nantes and Toulouse, obtained from their supervisory ministries, Agriculture and National Education, an increase of their promotions. By 2030, France will train 840 veterinarians, instead of 480 in 2017. They are also opening their courses to students from other training courses at bac+2 and bac+3, while the very selective preparatory class was the only access route before.
Source: Les Echos
