"The disturbing aspect of the solutions recently proposed to address the enormous shortages of medical personnel in the National Health Service is that, after the enormous increase in specialization contracts in the years of the Conte 2 and Draghi governments (finally!), they converge solely on increasing the number of graduating in Medicine and on exceeding the scheduled number in accessing medical faculties, all without any rationality and knowledge of the facts and, above all, without starting from the objective data of the existing situation".
This was said by Walter Ricciardi, doctor and university teacher, who has held important public roles in healthcare in recent years, at a hearing in the Culture Committee of the Senate on the issue of limited numbers in Medicine.
"Italy - he recalled - currently has around 370,000 doctors (excluding dentists) that is 6.111 per 1,000 inhabitants, the highest ratio in the world (second and third in the ranking are Austria and Germany) while we have proportionally double those compared to France and the United Kingdom.
It is easy to understand that increasing the number of medical graduates is not the solution, at least not to want to become the "medicine factory" of the world, with a plethora of professionals who will fight for a few poorly paid positions in Italy or will be forced to emigrate to "abroad, after having been trained in our country at the expense of the taxpayer and the families. The damage is beyond insult.
All this - continued Ricciardi - without talking about the quality of the training of professionals who will have to make decisions that can often mean life or death for their patients and who cannot be trained online or in megaclasses, perhaps in some cinema, given the unavailability of classrooms in the current understaffed and underfunded Italian universities.
The hope is that the problem of the NHS will be solved by increasing funding, we are currently among the last in industrialized countries, and by implementing a policy of hiring, remuneration and promotion of Italian doctors who are the only ones in the world to have lost purchasing power in the last 20 years, instead of increasing it.
In particular, the unavailability of young Italian doctors towards specializations that are seen as excessively heavy, absorbing and unsatisfactory from a remuneration point of view, such as Emergency Medicine or Surgery, and the total indifference towards all the medical specialties of the services (Clinical Microbiology, Clinical Pathology, Pathological anatomy).
In the absence of these specialists it will soon be very difficult to treat Italians.
Conversely, it appears essential to address medical training as happens in all the most advanced countries in the world, with access to a limited number of people, based on data calculated in a timely and transparent manner based on the healthcare needs of the Italian population, with rigorous and evidence-based selection procedures".
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