From 2020 to 2022, 32,500 beds were cut in Italian hospitals and between 2019 and 2022, over 11,000 doctors left public facilities.
Hospitals are also decreasing: in 10 years 95 (9%) have been closed. And there are fewer and fewer resources: in 2024, the financing of the Health Fund increased in absolute terms compared to 2021 but decreased compared to GDP and is eroded by inflation. The data are presented by the 75 scientific societies of hospital and university clinicians (FoSSC), who are asking the government for a "major structural reform and urgent measures to save the NHS. Treatment for everyone is at risk".
In just two years, during the Covid emergency, notes the coordinator of Fossc (Forum of the Scientific Societies of Italian Hospital and University Clinicians) Francesco Cognetti, the number of beds "has decreased, and 32,508 have been cut: in 2020 they were 257,977, reduced to 225,469 in 2022. It is estimated that, in Italian hospitals, there is a lack of at least 100 thousand ordinary inpatient beds and 12 thousand intensive care beds". And again: "the average age of doctors is increasingly higher, with as many as 56% over 55 compared to 14% in Great Britain, and by 2025, 29,000 white coats and 21 thousand nurses will retire, without a sufficient inclusion of new professionals, and more and more young people, trained at state expense (around 150 thousand euros each) go abroad, where they receive salaries even three times higher". The number of hospitals is also decreasing: in 10 years, 9% of them have been closed. In 2012 they were 1,091, in 2022 they dropped to 996, with a more significant reduction for public ones (67 less, from 578 to 511). Not only. In 2024, he states, "the financing of the National Health Fund increased in absolute terms compared to 2021, but decreased compared to GDP, and these resources were largely used for negligible contractual increases in staff, which are not capable of contain the exodus of doctors". Today at a press conference in Rome, at the headquarters of the representation in Italy of the Parliament and the European Commission, Fossc denounces the critical situation of the NHS: "The strengthening of hospitals is essential", is the request of the scientific societies. Cognetti also underlines that "the essential levels of Lea assistance, i.e. the treatments considered fundamental, are not respected in 12 out of 21 Regions. And these - he specifies - are the Lea currently in force which date back to the Prime Ministerial Decree of 29 November 2001, updated with the Prime Ministerial Decree of 12 January 2017, but never implemented".