at Antonio Panti
03 MAR –
Dear director,
288 doctors working in the emergency rooms of Tuscany sent a letter to the President of the Giunta threatening mass resignations if the age-old problems that were no longer tolerable were not addressed: personnel, shifts, administrative tasks, salaries and so on. The Venetian general doctors are on a war footing, their hospital colleagues are retiring early, there are no general doctors available to cover the shortages of the territory. Fewer young doctors appear in the competition for access to the three-year training in general medicine and, instead, many elderly people who want to change jobs.
In an article published in QS a few days ago, my colleague Maffei lamented the flight of many doctors towards the much more lucrative private sector, denouncing a sort of anthropological mutation of doctors from unconditional availability for public service to a mercantile vision of medicine.
At the same time, the FNOMCeO has resumed the preparatory work for the renewal of the Code of Conduct in which to address the major issues of public health, planet health, tragic choices, Artificial Intelligence, the relationship with the person in contemporary society and so on.
The discussion on the health crisis is in full swing, but only, apparently, among insiders. Ideas, figures, models are compared, there is talk of differentiated regionalism, of PNRR (by the way what happened to the proposals for the reorganization of the territory?), and in the meantime the doctors, who make the service work, go elsewhere or to early retirement or continue their work with discomfort, with less serenity, often caught up in burn out.
The writer comes from distant times when petitions were signed, debates were organized in all civil forums, marches, assemblies and even union agitations were held, while professional associations spent themselves for the protection of public health and the professionalism of the doctor which coincide in the functionality of the service.
I do not deny that there are pressures on politics and efforts to establish a dialogue and a confrontation between the social partners but everything appears sporadic, fragmented, unable to create a cultural and political climate in the citizens that substantiates the image of the national health service for what it it is, one of the greatest heritages of civilization.
It is possible that a common front is not formed, Professional Orders, Universities, Unions of all kinds, Scientific Societies, Patients’ Associations, to make the Italian people understand what they would lose if the service collapsed. And how can the service not collapse if the professionals leave?
One cannot escape the impression that everyone is agitating for himself and that there is a sort of indifference to the fate of the commons, as if the protection of the individual’s health had remained standing under Article 32 of the Constitution but had been lost the interest of the community.
Antonio Panti
March 03, 2023
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