Health. Medical certificate: for which sports is it mandatory?

As with every back-to-school season, GP appointment slots are booked up with requests for medical certificates for sports registration. However, many of these are not mandatory. The French Health Insurance recently reiterated the rules on its website.

Children and adolescents under the age of 18 who are registered in a sports club affiliated with a federation are not required to provide a medical certificate. Prospective registrants fill out a questionnaire provided by the federation, and a medical certificate may be requested based on the answers provided.

For those over 18, each federation is free to decide whether or not to require a medical certificate. For example, while the tennis federation does not require one, the football, judo, equestrian, and basketball federations require a certificate valid for three years.

However, for certain disciplines with specific constraints, the certificate is still compulsory for everyone and in all clubs: diving , combat sports which can result in a knockout and are practiced in competition, activities requiring a firearm or compressed air weapon, motor sports (except karting), mononautical disciplines (any motorized vehicle on the water, etc.).

2 million medical procedures per year

For non-federation sports, the decision to require a medical certificate or not is up to the association. And it is on this specific issue that the College of General Medicine (CMG) wanted to raise awareness for the 2025 academic year. At the end of June, the CMG called on clubs and associations not affiliated with a sports federation to remove the annual requirement for medical certificates.

"These annual certificates are a burden on the healthcare system. For example, if only 10 members per club among the 200,000 non-affiliated associations consult for a certificate, this already represents 2 million medical procedures per year - the equivalent of the activity of 400 full-time general practitioners out of the 50,000 in private practice! This wasted time could be devoted to treating patients, while the waiting times for obtaining a medical appointment continue to lengthen," justified the CMG, which deemed these differences between affiliated and non-affiliated clubs "absurd."

The CMG cites the example of the French Athletics Federation, which replaced the medical certificate with a Health Prevention Course (PPS) to be completed within three months before a race.

"The athlete is asked to watch informative videos, after which he or she is either encouraged to consult a doctor (for example, in the event of recent hospitalization, pain, shortness of breath, etc.), or he or she is given a number allowing him or her to register for the competition. This approach reduces the administrative burden while appropriately and repeatedly raising awareness among athletes about prevention."

The CMG founded the website certificats-absurdes.fr , which aims to denounce all the useless certificates requested by daycare centers, insurance companies, schools, and the workplace. These certificates, according to these doctors, serve no purpose. "These are consultations that should not be honored or reimbursed (by health insurance, editor's note) because they are not care," Jean-Philippe Platel, president of the Order of Physicians of the North, told BFMTV.