TRENTO. From the unflattering figure of the “health insurance doctor”, client hunter made famous by Alberto Sordi’s film, to the reassuring and professional one of family doctor, a fundamental point of reference for citizens in the complex world of public health. Over the years, the general practitioner has made many steps forward, and yet local doctors they are still effectively excluded from the “governance” of public health, forced to operate “in solitude”, often far or even detached from hospitals.
The complaint comes from Massimo Corradinihistoric Trentino dentist and today the referent of the Onda health thematic group. «The advent of the pandemic – says Corradini – was paradoxically functional to begin to focus on the peculiarities and potential of local medicine, but also all the flaws and criticalities of a system that has been marginalized for too many years and carelessly left in the hands of a short-sighted and often not very transparent company management that listens, if anything, only to the unions, to deal with contractual issues and rarely those of quality in health care».
A first step to take would therefore be to clarify the status of general practitioners and paediatricians of free choice: freelancers who work with an agreement contract. With all that goes with it. «Unfortunately, however – writes Corradini – the transformations in the professionalism of general practitioners and pediatricians of free choice that have occurred over the years have not been accompanied by an activity of informing users on the characteristics of the service offered. So while it is clear what a hospital doctor does and what services one can expect to receive in hospital, there is not as much clarity about the role of primary care doctor kept in a haze of improper claims. It was thus possible to pour on these figures any kind of taskbureaucratic and otherwise, creating the conditions for widespread conflicts, which often arise from lack of knowledge of roles and tasks».
The result is that “the excessive heterogeneity of behavior and the isolation in which most of the doctors in the area operate is increasingly generating frustration in individual professionals, especially in the more motivated and competent ones, up to the point of configuring the condition of “burn out”, a state of strong demotivation and despondency that afflicts many professionals, generating personal discomfort and often subtracting the best minds and professionalism from the healthcare system”. .
It’s still: “The role of the local doctor is destined to become increasingly central in the future, since it is in the area that all the activities of preventive medicine and management of chronic diseases are carried out and will have to be carried out even more. The reform of the NHS, in its territorial component, will therefore be a crucial point of the PNRR and the future health of all of us citizens will depend on the courage and competence that will guide the reforms. It is time and time for the doctors in the territory to be assigned only management roles and coordination within the Apss for the medicine of the territoryprecisely by virtue of the political autonomy we enjoy».