2023-05-25 18:13:00
Rome, 24 May. (time.news Salute) – Italy lacks 30,000 hospital doctors, 70,000 nurses and around 100,000 beds. This is the alarm raised by the Forum of the scientific societies of Italian hospital and university clinicians (FoSSC) which asks Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for urgent measures to save hospitals. The goal is to put a barrier to the progressive weakening of health care. The crisis of the system is in the numbers: in 10 years (2011-2021, 125 hospitals were closed, a good 12%. In 2011, between public and private, they were 1,120, to decrease to 995 in 2021, with a more marked cut for public facilities (84 fewer).In just one year, almost 21,500 beds were eliminated, increased only to face the toughest months of the pandemic: in 2020 they were 257,977, to then drop to 236,481 in 2021.
In our country there are about 130,000 hospital specialists, 60,000 fewer than in Germany and 43,000 fewer than in France. We are also witnessing a substantial exodus of new graduate and specialist doctors, more than 1,000 a year, because – the FoSSc still denounces – abroad salaries and working conditions are much better. In particular, in the Emergency Departments, the shortage of staff can be quantified at 4,200 white coats (in six months, from January to July 2022, 600 resigned, about 100 per month). Another important shortage is that which concerns about 70,000 nurses. And again: the forecast of health expenditure on GDP for 2023-2026 will already record a return to value of 6.3% in 2024 compared to an average of 8.8% of the 37 OECD countries and about 10% of France and Germany.
In the light of this scenario, today in Rome the representatives of the 30 scientific societies gathered in FoSSC addressed the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni directly to ask for the complete revision of the organizational parameters of the hospitals sanctioned by Ministerial Decree 70 (DM 70 of 2 April 2015 ). “We want to make our voice heard – says Francesco Cognetti, Coordinator of the Forum -. We represent the professionals who assist citizens in the wards. The right to health is in serious danger in our country. The situation of hospitals is really heavy, no longer tolerable and requires adequate and timely interventions”, he warns.
“The crisis of the hospital system, due to the anti-hospital policies of the previous Governments, paradoxically ignored by the Pnrr, is undeniable – denounces Cognetti in a note – and has reached such critical levels as to create for the first time in all of us an enormous problem The Minister of Health Schillaci is doing his part and is finally about to set up a technical discussion table on the critical issues of DM 70 and DM 77, which will involve, among others, authoritative clinicians proposed by the Forum. a problem of resources,” he remarks. “We are no longer willing to indulge, to the detriment of our moral duties, the wrong political choices that we have been undergoing as doctors for years, with extremely harmful consequences for our 15 million patients. We have always been on the side of the sick and for no reason do we intend to fail in our duties towards them. For this reason we ask President Meloni to adopt urgent measures “.
“We have learned with extreme interest the intentions of the Prime Minister to want to change the address and fields of application of the Pnrr – say the FoSSC companies -. We believe that this would be a unique opportunity for healthcare to use a large amount of funds already devolved to territorial medicine and unfortunately destined not to achieve the expected results, precisely due to the extreme shortage of medical and nursing staff.The 1,350 Community Houses envisaged by the Pnrr are not enough to solve health problems, if the knots are not addressed central to the profound crisis of hospitals and resources for staff recruitment. If it is impossible to transfer these economic resources from the Pnrr, it will necessarily be necessary to do otherwise”, they argue.
And again: “We must definitively abandon all the dehospitalization policies that have affected the sector in the last 40 years – underlines Fossc-. We need to hire a large number of doctors and nurses, to strengthen hospitals. Furthermore, the exodus of recent graduates must be curbed , who go abroad to specialize, and the early retirement of many doctors, who must be guaranteed better salaries to avoid, for example, running away from the emergency room.The shameful problem of tokenist doctors must also be resolved, who represent the desperate answer to a dramatic shortage of personnel, but in this situation even this is very difficult. The historic duality between hospital and territory must be overcome, in favor of a single system of interconnected, continuous and complementary services. The real hospital must also functionally extend to healthcare realities What is territorial must be considered pre- and post-hospital, in an integrated vision of the two realities. We hope that the Government will listen to the clinicians who treat citizens in hospitals every day”.
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