However, almost no one uses it.
Finding a doctor for quick consultation in the middle of summer is often the obstacle course. This difficulty, well known to vacationers, also persists for many throughout the year: moving, retirement of his attending physician or simply a closed cabinet in the evening and weekends. Proximity medical offices are not always accessible when you need them most. Faced with this observation and to avoid the saturation of emergency services, the Ministry of Health has launched the national campaign “need a doctor? Follow the right path” which is accompanied by an interactive card to locate the health professionals available everywhere in France.
This campaign aims to better orient patients in the event of “unscheduled care”, in other words medical consultations which, without raising the vital emergency, require medical advice within 48 hours, for example for high fever, urinary tract infection or persistent pain. “The objective is to raise awareness of the right reflexes in order to facilitate the management of unscheduled care, allow everyone a response to their needs and avoid a systematic recourse to emergencies”explains the Ministry of Health.
Accessible on the Santé.fr site, this card specifically identifies houses and health centers, medical care houses and medical offices that accept patients outside their usual patients. She “is updated regularly to reflect availability and opening hours in real time.” It is the health professionals themselves who register their office there. For example, at the end of July 2025, we see that the area west of Paris (Eure-et-Loir) is best equipped with 213 professionals. For vacationers, the offer is particularly dense on the Mediterranean coast, especially in the Alpes-Maritimes (Nice region) with 166 doctors and in the Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille region) which count 158.
The use of this card is accompanied by a clear instruction: always calling your doctor in the first place. If it is not available, the second reflex is to consult the card online. As a last resort, “If no offer is available, call 15 before going to the emergency room”. A SAMU regulatory doctor can then direct you to the most adequate structure, without unnecessary displacement.
