Few others times an election has closely affected doctors, and more generally health workers, such as the one to be held next Sunday and Monday, 12 and 13 February, in Lombardy and Lazio.
The evidence of the pandemic has in fact mercilessly uncovered all the multiple points of vulnerability of the system: the lack of personnel, more evident in some crucial positions, also associated with an increasingly advanced average age of professionals; the deficits of hospital structures and instruments, such as intensive care beds and ventilators, but also and above all of a widespread presence on the territory, in terms of prevention and integrated social and health care; the absence of effective internal communication, in both directions, between field staff and higher, but also intermediate decision-making levels; the weight of bureaucracy, which for procedures related to Covid-19 has exceeded the alert level; the backwardness or inadequacy of digitization, while we continue to look with hope (but more mentioning it in conferences than applying it in practice) to telemedicine.
In recent months, thanks to the abandonment of all non-pharmacological measures and the return after the truce of the pandemic of infectious diseases typical of the bad season, tens of thousands of citizens have remained without a doctor or a pediatrician of reference, so the emergency has returned to be heavily felt in the emergency rooms.
Only in 1,120 medical managers and 1,521 nurses, a vacuum that can hardly be solved only by promising more hires or accepting requests from abroad, since, in addition to the issues of language and equivalence of qualifications, the imbalance between supply and demand for these professions is global.Competition, therefore, is fierce.
Dramatic in many sectors is the situation of waiting lists, already flooded before the pandemic, which today struggle to dispose of the services accumulated in the last three years, as described by Milena Gabanelli in her Dataroom in the Corriere della Sera. As a result, the anger of citizens explodes more and more often on health personnel, even when this is not directly responsible for the inefficiencies, and cases of violence accentuate the tendency to abandon the most exposed health facilities.
In short, there are many issues on the table and all candidates, whatever their political color, are aware of this. Just as they are aware that, if health is already governed mainly at the regional level – an approach that has not been affected even by the pandemic emergency -, the new step forward towards autonomy put in place by the Meloni government will further accentuate the prerogatives and responsibilities of those who will be elected.The proposals change between the different parties, if not of immediate solutions, at least of approach, for example in relation to the relationship between public and private health, which especially in Lombardy is an essential junction and one of the points of greatest distance between the candidates’ proposals.
Although it is not a consultation at national level, finally, the vote in the coming days could influence the choices that will be taken in the coming months and years also at ministerial level. In fact, it involves two of the most populous regions of Italy, where very different models have been pursued in recent years. More than 12 million voters will be called to the polls, of which almost 8 in Lombardy, the Italian region with the most doctors (over 50,000), followed by Lazio. Make yourselves heard.
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