Healthcare that works well for all patients from north to south

THE HEALTH POLICY it is the set of decisions made by people who govern, manage, provide and pay for health care. They make choices that affect every aspect of health services. Through laws, ministerial or regional ordinances, regulations, funding and management decisions, health policy defines opportunities, contracts, supplies and constraints, which determine how doctors and other health professionals provide care every day, in each Region of Bel. Country. Let’s face it: theepidemic in progress has highlighted such a confusion between who should decide and what, to generate in many a sense of uncertainty and even inadequacy. Is it possible that each ASL can do differently from another? Is it possible that every “expert” interviewed on TV can say opposite things to a colleague, with whom he seems to enjoy getting into a fight? All that remains is to spend the European money allocated to our health care well, focusing on a clear decision-making level and effective communication.

Here is the letter received from a colleague: “I am a Piedmontese family doctor; in November 2020 I got sick with Covid. Not going out for dinner or enjoying an aperitif on the Navigli, but visiting a patient who died in the following days from Covid. I thought I had been careful, that I protected myself sufficiently and instead … It was hard to be on the other side, with an oxygen helmet and the fear of not making it, understanding what happened to those who, staying in the same room as me, came intubated and transferred to intensive care, or worse who, in the next room, went to visit Our Lord. I have to thank the colleagues of the sub-intensive, nurses and nurses who assisted me, looked after me, accompanied me to the bathroom when my legs could no longer hold up and monitored every hour. I have to thank those who showed me affection and who, despite declaring themselves a friend, did not even care to know if I was alive. Healed, I went back to the patients to visit and vaccinate; for this, I have been called “servant of the master” by those who, denier or no vax by faith, do not deserve a degree in medicine for obvious incompetence. Patience! In the great pandemic confusion, the right of everyone to express their opinion seems to be tolerated. I am alive and, unlike many health workers who fell on the front line, I knocked on the door of St. Peter’s and went back. Every evening, I can’t help but think of the friends for whom, instead, the door has opened ”.

Open doors

Whoever opens the doors of a national health service that eliminates the transfer of competences to the Regions will not be as authoritative as St. Peter’s, but at least it will guarantee those who live in Italy that they can count on the same diagnostic and therapeutic quality in Trapani as in Bolzano. But the money to be spent must not only finance the hospital services to be adapted. The epidemic has taught that if family doctors do not work, because they do not know how to work together, nor do they have adequate tools or schedules and effectiveness of performance, only hospital admissions work. Here, the doors of St. Peter’s are so close that it is difficult to knock without them being opened.