We have been with the same doctor fo 15 years and he is now retiring at the end of the year. He is a one man practice and is not being replaced. Like us all he deserves his retirement and we wish him a long and happy one. We have found 2 practices within a reasonable distance that are taking on new patients so I don’t want to enter into discussion of the lack of doctors regionally or nationally.
I would like to know how the carte vitale/cpam system works when making the change.
Obviously we need to make a RDV with our chosen doctor and presumably they will want to do a full health examination to know what we are about. Is there a raft of paperwork invokved or is the exercise relatively seamless.
Anyones knowledge or practical experience would be most welcome.
Relatively seamless. Now that registering a medecin traitant is done on-line, if the doctor accepts you they will use your carte vitale to access the “professionals only” areas of CPAM and put their details in.
As far as I know, the extent of preliminary health examinations varies massively from doctor to doctor.
I hope you have as good an experience with your chosen new person as you’ve had with your previous one!
As it happens, we had notification of “another document has dropped into your space…”
So I’ve opened Ameli etc etc…
and the information you seek is there, under Droits et Demarches…
The Doc you visit/choose can actually do the whole thing via your Carte Vitale… while you are there…
Brilliant, thanks @AngelaR @Stella, just as I was hoping.
Just need to choose now and hope that our aging bodies don’t prove to be too complicated to concider taking on and maintaining!
@JohnBoy
Do you use “Mon Espace Santé”… as that is where medical stuff gets stored, for us at least…
Reports from specialists, prescriptions etc etc…
If not… and you have prescriptions, X-rays etc (we have huge files 
) it might be useful to have the latest to hand, in case your “new” Doc wants 'em. Perhaps better to have more than you need, than not have the one bit of paper that’s important…
Other than that… I wonder if you can ask your current Doc what happens to the info stored on his/her computer… ???
All good advice and I don’t contradict it but, all I did was go to the new cabinet to be told simply ask for your dossier from the old one and bring it here. I did that, no fuss, and within 24 hours the large envelope was taken by me from one to the other and that was that.
I bet you had to hand over your Carte Vitale… for a quick swipe… 
You must feel comfortable and confident with your Family Doctor…
If you have a choice of 2… and both have same qualifications/reputations…
I would choose the one who speaks slowly enough for me to understand… the one who takes his/her time, rather than rushing me through a rendezvous.
Our Family Doctor is brilliant and I judge all Medical Folk by his standards.
I’ve told him (quite firmly) that he’s not allowed to retire and he’s promised to hang-on as long as he can… 
The only thing to add to the good advice is to do it sooner rather than later. All his patients will b e looking for a new MT eventually, and whilst other doctors in the area are taking on new patients now that might not be the case at the end of the year.
When my doctor retired, he gave me a dusty brown envelope containing my medical records (he had no computer) which he told me to hand over to his replacement the next time I visited.
I handed them over to the new doctor but I’m assuming he transferred my medical history into his computer from the Carte Vitale. Or would his computer be permanently connected to a central database for access to my records?
And where would my old paper records have gone? Officially shredded or in storage somewhere?
Ours were given back to us within a day after they had transferred everything to their computer. It is sitting beside me in a ‘to do’ pile and will one day augment my failing memory
When I get a round tuit.
I was given one of those as a joke by a friend many years ago.
My new doctor wanted everything printed out. My old doctor refused to print everything out and asked for a usb stick and loaded everything on there. The new doctor refused it, so I had to print everything out myself, which I believe the new doctor’s receptionist then scanned into her computer!
At which point I would have made a dash for the door.
The doctor has a good reputation though.
I think they would need to 