Valletoux Law What Changes for Temporary Work
11 February 2026 · 5 min reading time
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See job offersAdopted on December 27, 2023, the Valletoux Law aims to improve access to healthcare across the territory, particularly in areas facing a shortage of healthcare professionals. While the text broadly addresses the organization of the healthcare system, it also includes several measures regulating the use of medical temporary staffing.
Working conditions, access to assignments, use by healthcare facilities: the reform introduces changes to the rules governing temporary work in the healthcare sector. Physicians, nurses, nursing assistants, and recent graduates are directly concerned.
Here is what the Valletoux Law concretely changes for temporary healthcare work.
What is the Valletoux Law?
The Valletoux Law is a reform designed to strengthen the organization of the French healthcare system in response to medical recruitment pressures. Officially, it focuses on the territorial commitment of healthcare professionals and on the levers available to better distribute healthcare provision across the country.
The text covers a broad scope: cooperation between facilities, new responsibilities for certain professionals, organization of healthcare territories, and mechanisms aimed at strengthening continuity of care. It is part of a series of reforms undertaken by public authorities to address structural imbalances in the sector.
Among the areas addressed is also the regulation of certain practice arrangements, including medical temporary staffing, which is subject to specific measures detailed in the remainder of this article.
Why does the law regulate medical temporary staffing?
The use of temporary staff has grown significantly in healthcare facilities in recent years, particularly in public hospitals. Due to insufficient permanent staff, many departments have relied on replacement professionals to maintain operations.
This growing dependence has raised several issues. From an organizational standpoint, high staff turnover complicates continuity of care and coordination between professionals. From a budgetary perspective, the cost of temporary work has also risen sharply, putting additional pressure on already strained hospital finances.
In response, public authorities have sought to better regulate the use of temporary staffing, not to eliminate it, but to control its deployment. The objective is to preserve its role as a short-term replacement solution while preventing it from becoming a structural operating model for certain facilities.
What does the Valletoux Law provide regarding the use of temporary staffing in healthcare?
The Valletoux Law does not abolish the use of temporary staffing in healthcare facilities. However, it does impose stricter oversight on its use in order to better regulate its deployment within hospital structures.
The text specifies the situations in which facilities may call upon temporary professionals. Temporary work must address a short-term need, such as replacing an absent employee, reinforcing teams during activity peaks, or responding to identified recruitment difficulties. It cannot be used as a long-term operating model to ensure the ongoing activity of a department.
The reform also strengthens monitoring obligations. Facility management must be able to justify their use of temporary staffing and demonstrate its necessity, particularly when recruitment tensions are invoked.
Finally, this development is part of a broader effort to structure healthcare career pathways, with the aim of preventing temporary staffing from becoming a systematic mode of practice or a prolonged substitute for permanent positions.
Can a newly graduated professional take on temporary assignments?
The Valletoux Law regulates access to temporary staffing for early-career healthcare professionals. A recently graduated caregiver can no longer immediately take on temporary assignments within a healthcare facility.
The text establishes a minimum prior practice period before being able to perform temporary assignments. For the medical professions concerned, this period is set at two years of full-time professional activity carried out within a stable practice framework.
This requirement aims to ensure that professionals have sufficient operational experience before stepping in as replacements. Temporary assignments often involve rapid onboarding, frequently in high-pressure departments, requiring immediate autonomy.
For recent graduates, access to temporary work therefore remains possible, but at a later stage, after an initial period of employment through fixed-term contracts, permanent contracts, or locum work allowing them to acquire this prior experience.
What impact does this have on healthcare facilities?
The Valletoux Law introduces a more structured framework for the use of temporary staffing by healthcare facilities. Hospital management retains the ability to mobilize replacement professionals but must now position these recruitments within a logic of identified and justifiable need.
The use of temporary work must rely on specific situations such as unanticipated absences, vacant positions, or proven recruitment difficulties. Facilities are required to ensure more rigorous monitoring of these practices, both administratively and financially.
This development also implies stronger anticipation of staffing needs. Healthcare structures are encouraged to prioritize team stabilization solutions while reserving temporary staffing for situations of genuine operational strain.
In practice, the reform does not eliminate hospital temporary staffing but regulates its use more strictly, with increased employer accountability in managing medical and paramedical human resources.
What are the consequences for medical staffing agencies?
The implementation of the Valletoux Law requires medical staffing agencies to adapt their practices. Their role no longer consists solely of providing professionals but now operates within a regulatory framework that must be respected.
Agencies must ensure the compliance of the profiles they propose, verifying that the conditions for temporary practice are met, particularly for early-career professionals. This verification is now integrated into recruitment and placement processes.
The reform also strengthens the importance of assignment traceability. Agencies work in coordination with facilities to secure placements, both administratively and contractually.
In this context, their support role takes on a more structuring dimension, both for healthcare professionals, in managing their career pathways, and for facilities, in securing their temporary recruitment.
How can temporary professionals adapt to the new rules?
The evolution of the regulatory framework leads healthcare professionals to adapt how they approach temporary work within their careers. Access to assignments now relies more heavily on acquired experience and on the ability to operate quickly in operational roles.
In this context, the valorization of field experience becomes a central lever. Facilities seek autonomous profiles capable of integrating without prolonged training phases, which reinforces the weight of clinical experience in access to assignments.
The choice of staffing agency also becomes a structuring factor. Compliance of placements, verification of practice prerequisites, and administrative security of assignments are now part of a more formalized framework.
Temporary staffing thus retains its place within professional pathways, with a positioning that aligns more with a logic of expertise and mobility than with entry into the profession.
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