Family doctors. If not now, when?

by Enzo Bozza

21 FEB – Dear Director,
If anything surpasses the arrogant, nagging inconsistency of the government in health matters, it is the plaintive litany of my GP colleagues who have assumed apotropaic, evangelical submission to fate, with the typical posture of the visiting pensioner at construction sites, criticizing everything and everyone but always with his hands behind his back and the grim eye of someone who knows a lot but submits to the will of the gods. But all the missing solutions to the many problems of basic medicine that would be solved with a government genius that we have been waiting for for about two centuries, i.e. addiction, have to do not with the will of the gods, but with an ultrauranic necessity that dominates them: the ananke of the Greeks: the necessity of the cosmos which wants its laws unchanged.

The conviction of about sixty governments that the health problems of the territory must be faced with a rented army remains unchanged. Because such we are: doctors not employed by the public service but paid a lot per kilo like the Samnites of the Roman army, sent to the front line because they are particularly pissed off and ready to fight, but never Rome’s hoplites. Julius Caesar knew a lot about war strategy and understood who to place in front of the legions. Among other things, the dead Samnites were never counted, because they were not Romans.

We continue to be at the forefront of the territory to address people’s health problems, despite a thousand corporate nonsense and the pernicious governmental myopia of the brain. The brain can only be short-sighted if we are dealing with ministerial brains, a political concept, not a medical one. This is the only way to explain the attachment to the tragicomic concept that the general practitioner should be, yes, subordinate to everything and everyone, but never a public employee of a state that says it loves us and then kicks us in the back. And we’ve gotten so used to kicking that we can only mumble to ourselves like pensioners queuing in front of the post office. Always patient but never decisive, nor determined to change things.

And this is the crux of the whole matter: we have never been and we do not feel like a working category. No compactness and no real union weight, we are mavericks and used to working alone without any real planning or protection. It is no coincidence that for forty years nothing has changed, not even with evidence of a profound pandemic crisis, not even in the face of the flight of so many of us. Hence the bitter observation of our insipience and the most serious total inability of our unions to represent and protect our category-NOT category. Our chats drip with bad mood, resentment, anger, loneliness but we lack the strength and conviction to take the field and assert, once and for all, our professionalism and the importance of our work for the NHS.

It’s time to stop the inconclusive whining of lonely hearts and give substance to the bad mood. Or, let’s declare ourselves defeated and endangered species. Probably the ananke has decided that we no longer serve the economy of the cosmos: let’s take note of it. But enough with the whining of mourners in perpetual mourning, the humiliating marginality in which we ended up in the healthcare system could have been enough, let’s not put the inconclusive, indecent and unworthy proclaiming ourselves sacrificial victims on the altar of public health. It just depends on us. Let’s make a grassroots committee as pissed off as the Samnites and put ourselves in the front row: the place that has been ours for centuries.

Enzo Bozza
General practitioner in Vodo and Borca di Cadore (BL)

February 21, 2023
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