Increasingly retired doctors, fewer and fewer young doctors ready to replace them: the image of the risk of collapse in the context of territorial medicine in Italy it takes the form of a trivial mathematical equation. The population in Italy is getting older and older, with consequences on public spending, resources and health personnel committed to managing more and more patients. With 24 million chronic patientsthe expenditure of energy and resources will grow further.
The general medicine van irreversible situation will arise if action is not taken in time. At the moment, despite the increase in scholarships, there is still a gap between graduates and specialists. The specialty of General Medicine is less and less sought after among young people, weighing the stress on the profession, bureaucracy, and financial aspects. To the last competition in Lombardy just over 500 candidates presented themselves for 868 positions. The problem of general practitioners is not isolated: more than 120,000 medical specialists are expected to retire by 2027. The problem is rarely addressed in the media and public discussion, and this is a curious fact, considering that Healthcare occupies about 80% of the budget regional.
Some countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, have long started telemedicine processes: patients can receive a doctor’s “visit” from home, online, even using do-it-yourself machines, which allow the doctor to receive data on vital signs. In some remote areas of France there are do-it-yourself laboratories, where patients can go to be televised by doctors, to respond to the problem of the lack of doctors in marginal areas. At the moment, the telemedicine, combined with a reorganization of territorial processes, and a greater and different allocation of resources, it could represent one of the saving elements of the system. Without political intervention, however, the system risks gradually collapsing, with a price that will be paid mainly by patients.