by N. Placentino, L. Iannantuoni, GB D’Errico
28 LUG –
Dear Director,
it is clear to everyone how the covid pandemic has dramatically highlighted the fragility and inhomogeneity of the local health system. System that is based on the self-denial and good will of general practitioners. But self-denial and goodwill are no longer sufficient to face the challenges and needs of modern healthcare, especially when dealing with current emergencies.
The current legislation entrusts the teaching of family medicine to the Provincial Orders of Doctors who organize the courses by choosing teachers and topics to be treated with different criteria throughout the national context.
Criteria, therefore, far from the creation of an indispensable, single core curriculum. It therefore appears clear that such a managed training cannot in any way face the new challenges that family medicine is already facing.
Among other things, the figure of the general practitioner with “special interest” (the so-called expert GP) is gaining momentum who, in addition to continuing to carry out the traditional functions of his role, develops a particular interest and skills in a specific clinical setting.
Therefore, a new reality is emerging in which the need for a cultural and professional adaptation of family medicine is becoming more and more urgent. The transformation of the general medicine course into a university specialization school is an essential element to retrain local medicine, as has always been the case in many European and non-European states.
Without a timely and appropriate cultural leap leading to new training, the profession of general practitioner will be doomed first to inefficiency and then to extinction. A university graduate school is needed to train medical specialists in primary care / primary health care, as required by the WHO (DIM February 4, 2015).
A specialized path that allows you to acquire greater skills, homogeneous throughout the national territory, to face the challenges of the future. The establishment of a scientific disciplinary sector would allow young colleagues to undertake university roles, leading to the development of research on the territory, an indispensable element for a quality of performance. Only with the transformation of the current course, fragmented and incomplete, not adequate to the new needs of territorial medicine of the future, will it be possible to restore scientific dignity to the discipline in a specialized university course.
The time is ripe for this step, we must realize that we can no longer wait, for the sake of our patients and our young colleagues who want to take up this profession. Giving an epochal turning point is the only way to avoid the impoverishment of the discipline, which is already not very attractive today and relegated as the last professional choice>.
Nunzia PlacentinoNational President of Assimefac
Leonida Iannantuoni
President CTS Assimefac
Giovanni B. D’Errico
Head of the Assimefac oncology area
July 28, 2022
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