In Italy, as far as health workers are concerned, “a crime has been committed. We are the country that has less than the others compared to the population”. We have “lost 40,000 employees of the National Health Service since 2010 for retirement and emigration. Two thousand doctors a year have gone away, trained with our money, with the sacrifice of families. We lost 3 thousand family doctors between 2013 and 2019. And by 2027 we will have a shortage of over 47,284 doctors in the NHS “. All this” because it was not planned “correctly. Walter Ricciardi, president, does the ‘math’. of the Word Federation of Public Health Association (Wfph), during the conference for the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Italian Society of General Medicine and Primary Care (Simg), today in Rome. “These are striking data, which Carlo Cottarelli and I have calculatedand I challenge you to say that they are not true, “he adds.
In Italy, Ricciardi points out, “we have 97.4 fewer health workers per 10 thousand inhabitants, or 3.7 fewer workers (always out of 10 thousand inhabitants) than in Austria, considered ‘performer’ in Europe. he last decade has been reduced by the turnover block and the training funnel. It is as if, traveling on a plane, instead of cutting unnecessary expenses, we had cut the engines.
To this scenario, continues Ricciardi, “is added the fact that the average age of health personnel has increased. Italy, together with Germany, holds the record for doctors in the age group between 55 and 64, with 53.3% of doctors over 55 compared to an OECD value of 34% “.
A situation “linked to the lack of planning and the organizational inability of Italian politics which also led to phenomena such as professional migration abroad, linked to low remuneration, pension reforms that accentuate the simultaneous demographic effect of the pension hump and ‘training funnel for trainees “. Riccardi, tracing the picture of the Italian situation, put in difficulty even by low public funding for a long period, recalled that the Great Britain that invented the public health service “then committed suicide in this field with political choices and wrong social issues. We still have time to avoid it. If not now when? “, concluded Ricciardi.