by Pierino Di Silverio
Faced with the numbers of the new Nadef which estimate levels of health expenditure for the next few years at pre-prepandemic levels, the promises of the Minister of Health to increase the salaries of doctors, curb the shortage and recover unpaid services are always enveloped in a toxic cloud. less breathable. The doctors of the NHS are going to experience a three-year period of economic stasis, despite an Italian doctor earning 70% less than a German colleague and 40% less than an English one
08 NOV –
The new government’s NADEF confirms the definition of health care for the two-year period 2023-2024 and sets 2025 spending at 6% of GDP, at levels below the pre-year levels. In short, from the 2023 Budget Law, health care cannot expect any increase beyond the 2 billion already foreseen, as the Regions also warn, complaining of insufficient funding.
Nothing new on the western front. Faced with these numbers, the promises of the Minister of Health to increase the salaries of doctors, curb the shortage and recover unpaid services are enveloped in an increasingly less breathable toxic cloud. The doctors of the NHS are going to experience a three-year period of economic stagnation, despite an Italian doctor earning 70% less than a German colleague and 40% less than an English one (OECD 2020).
The crisis of public health, and the crisis of public doctors, represents one of the emergencies to be faced in the near future. Because health cannot be considered a problem among others.
Because public health is worth 11 points of GDP and because millions of citizens are forced to give up treatment or go to the private sector, while the growth of inequalities makes half the country similar to Eastern Europe.
Care is not an option to be entrusted to income and residence. The right to health of citizens, fundamental as constitutional patriotism requires, must be a priority in government programs, and at the same time it must be inseparable from the right of doctors to provide care, independently and responsibly, especially in human professional and social conditions.
Unfortunately, the working conditions of the doctors and health managers of the NHS pay for the wrong planning of a decade, pay for political choices that have gone in recent years towards a progressive and wild definition of care, but also pay for the delays in contract renewals, accumulated over the decade and still present today with a contract that has already expired and is still not in question today.
And the difficulties of the operators are a factor limiting access to treatment and encouraging the professional desertification we are witnessing. Once again we recall what the Regions affirmed, “it is necessary to invest in healthcare professionals, increasing salaries, reviewing policies and training capacity”. In particular, it is urgent to intervene with the taxation of advantage or tax exemption that is for the work in the wards and an extraordinary recruitment plan that exceeds anachronistic spending ceilings and reduces outsourcing, a cause of wage dumping and worsening of the quality and safety of care and with the creation of a new working and organizational model that goes beyond the concept of hospital intended as an economic company.
It is urgent to intervene with legislative measures that recognize the status of medical managers to specialists and enhance the role and work of the medical and health management.
It is urgent to intervene with legislative measures that can open those professional cages in which doctors and health managers of the NHS have been locked up for too long.
It is urgent to intervene by working on that decriminalization of the medical act which has produced insufficient and confusing laws to date.
The frustration and anger that cross aisles emptier than cribs testify to the current level of staff burnout and intolerance towards a system that exposes people to social de-legitimization and aggression, not just verbal. It is up to the Government to take charge of the discomfort that this professional heritage expresses before the last wheel of the wagon breaks.
We do our part.
Pierino Di Silverio
National Secretary Anaao Assomed
08 November 2022
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