from daily healthcare
The “Family Doc” or paid family doctor arrives in Veneto
We read it on the portal: “It’s called Family Doc, and it is a private internal medicine service, with a touch of friendliness and family warmth. With us, feeling at ease is the norm, at a cost of 50 euros.” Veneto’s trade unions and medical associations are talking about privatisation. The unions: “After the entry of private entities into hospitals, the risk is now that of increasing the expense borne by families.” Fromceo Veneto: “This is the result of the lack of national and regional agreements”
It’s called Family doc, or the paid family doctor. And the unions and the president Fromceo of Veneto, Francesco Noce, define it as a tragedy for public health. In both voices that are made heard through a note for the unions and by telephone for the regional President of the Orders of Surgeons and Dentists, “public health is losing pieces”, while this new paid service is inserted in the Padua area right between the cracks of the MMG’s staff shortages.
“This would be a ‘nice’ doctor who provides specialist services at affordable prices. Can prescribe drugs for a fee – explains Manuela De Paolis, Confederal Secretary CGIL Padua, Stefania Botton, Territorial Secretary UST Cisl Padua and Rovigo e Massimo Zanetti, Uil Padua Provincial Coordinator – visits and specialist services for a fee and does not replace the general practitioner”.
“It is not clear why citizens – continue the three trade union organizations jointly – who already pay taxes for public healthcare should prefer this service to that of the affiliated general practitioner. This new and dangerous tendency to offer services similar to, but not alternative to, conventional general medicine places the right to health within a market logic. The person who finds himself in a fragile situation must not become an instrument of business profit. After the entry of private entities into hospitals, which in fact increased the expenditure borne by healthcare companies without improving the service, now the risk is to increase the expenditure borne by families, without achieving a real useful objective to citizens but only to private healthcare entrepreneurs”.
An initiative in the Padua area which for president Francesco Noce is not surprising, after all it already exists in the Veneto and in Italy.
“The main cause – explains the president of the Venetian Orders of Surgeons and Dentists – is that local medicine is forgotten by everyone amidst the lack of national agreements on the renewal of the new convention, while at a regional level the same thing is happening: there are two and a half years that it has not been possible to reach agreements on local medicine with the Veneto Region. The most serious fact is that at this rate the number of patients without a doctor is increasing more and more, while the doctors remaining in the area do not work less than seventy hours a week between bureaucratic tasks, phone calls, emails, etc.”
“I don’t know if all this is a coincidence or a pre-ordained plan for the privatization of medicine, which would be a crazy and dramatic plan for our country and for our NHS, I hope I’m wrong but the current situation doesn’t make me think of anything else ” concludes Noce.