The Order of Doctors against the Councilor for Welfare of the Lombardy Region Letizia Moratti. The words spoken by Moratti during the inauguration ceremony of a house in the Bergamo community were triggered by the doctors’ “disappointment” and “displeasure”. On that occasion, the doctors reported, the regional councilor stressed the fact that the problem of local medicine is not due to a shortage of general practitioners, but is caused by an organizational problem dictated by the fact that the latter do not work sufficiently.
“Another unfortunate and offensive externalization that highlights a worrying absence of
awareness of the situation in which Lombard territorial medicine finds itself ”, according to Gianfranco Lima, president of the Order of Surgeons and Dentists. “We express bewilderment and bitterness for these statements which absolutely do not reflect the reality of the facts and which demonstrate a worrying lack of interest and systematic underestimation of the difficulties facing General Medicine.
It is now well known that colleagues flee from this professional branch due to both early retirement and the lack of interest of young colleagues in the specific training course. Finally, we recall how many citizens today do not have a family doctor. We remind you how the time to which the commissioner Moratti refers is actually a minimum time from the national contract for the opening of doctors’ offices dedicated to outpatient visits and how this, during the
years in our Ats, through local agreements, it has been extended. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that general practitioners organized in association forms guarantee hourly coverage every weekday until 19.00 and on Saturdays from 08.00 to 12.00.
Numerous hours in which a series of collateral activities are carried out should be added to the clinic hours, by way of example but not limited to: organization and management of vaccination and screening campaigns; management of bleeding patients; execution of the antigenic swabs and the consequent reporting and registration process; monitoring of covid positive patients; management of chronic patients; certification activities; last but not least, scheduled and occasional home visits.
In light of the ever increasing bureaucratic burden (linked to the pandemic and beyond), we also have
there has been a growing concern on the part of family doctors that their clinical role is
reference of citizens is transformed into a role with exclusively administrative-secretarial functions “.
“Therefore”, continues Lima, “the statements released show how much there is no knowledge on the part of the Lombardy Region of how and how much their family doctors work. We want to underline our closeness to our general practitioners colleagues, understanding their uncertainty in the professional future that can only accentuate dropouts and the risk of burnout. The statements of the commissioner Moratti can only remove the dialogue and give rise to further protest movements far from proactive and constructive intentions.
We hope that the will to dialogue with family doctors will return in order to effectively improve their quality of work without further overloading them with bureaucratic tasks, loosening them more and more from clinical and assistance activities towards their clients “.
© All rights reserved