To discourage the phenomenon of defensive medicine, the way is to “make complaints against doctors difficult, when they are obviously blatantly unfounded and instrumental complaints, providing for sanctions for those who present them”. This is the objective that the ministerial commission for the study and deepening of the problems relating to medical professional negligence is working on, as President Adelchi d’Ippolito explains to ANSA.
The orientation, he clarifies, “is that is to discourage so-called reckless, or unfounded, complaints, providing that whoever submits such a complaint must then answer for it. Among the hypotheses there is that of providing, for example, for financial penalties. The The objective, therefore, is to protect doctors from unfounded complaints, for fear of which they are driven to defensive medicine with an excess of prescriptions for tests, and at the same time to protect patients”.
This would therefore be the direction in which the commission will proceed, while the hypothesis of a tout court decriminalization of medical errors would be shelved, which “could present profiles of unconstitutionality”, notes the magistrate. The point, he adds, is that “judicial assaults on doctors must be avoided by adopting a balanced approach that considers the needs of healthcare professionals and patients”.
On the other hand, he recalls, “currently, out of 100 complaints that are presented, only 2 lead to conviction. This means that as many as 98 are therefore unfounded”.
The commission will have one year to complete the work. In the next meetings, concludes d’Ippolito, “we will start the hearings of the interested categories, i.e. the associations of doctors and those of patients”.
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