by Ornella Mancin
04 FEB – Dear Director,
the future of family medicine is looming the birth of an “ircocervo”, an animal half goat half deer whose figure was used by Benedetto Croce to indicate the absurdity of putting together liberalism and socialism and recovered in more recent times by Berlusconi to abhor the unnatural alliance between the League and the 5-star Movement, which among other things happened with the results we all know.
This mythological figure gives a good idea of what he is setting up for general medicine.
On the one hand we have the trade unions (primarily the majority union) that wants to save the convention at any cost, on the other the Regions that want dependent working conditions and so the circocervo is served.
The trade union, in order not to lose the agreement, has accepted over the years the total distortion of our profession by making us become employees / officials of the State and is now also willing to digest the obligation of an hourly schedule of 38 hours per week as employees but without the protections of addiction.
On the other hand, the State has given birth to a reform that offers a health home for every 50,000 inhabitants (let’s say proximity in person) and decides that the solution to all evils lies in the fact that family doctors work little, three hours a day. according to the most sinister television populism, and therefore the solution lies in forcing them to do 38 hours.
Do they really think the problem lies here?
Many of us have been doing a lot more than these hours a week for a long time and yet we struggle, we are exhausted, we cannot respond to all requests. Isn’t it that we have been assigned improper tasks?
Just in these days a newspaper of my Region was titled “The Region curries the doctors. Strike? Make tampons “
Do our rulers really think that doing all-day tampons, quarantine, tracking, and healing certificates is the reason we chose to enter the medical profession? Are these really the tasks that identify us as doctors? These purely bureaucratic activities are distracting us from the care of our patients and instead of relieving us from some chore they put us more and more (see treatment plans first for the Naos and now for drugs for diabetes: if they are drugs that we can finally prescribe why do not remove the therapeutic plans? What are they for?).
I fear that the regions with dependence really intend to transform us into their officials, taking away from us any possibility of autonomy, transforming us into little more than specialized workers.
After all, the trade unions, Fimmg in the first place, are interested in maintaining the relationship of the agreement (which allows the maintenance of the Enpam and the control of the Medical Associations) and it does not matter if the Convention is emptied of its content.
Wouldn’t the time have come to reflect deeply on what doctor we want and what public service we are able to guarantee?
It is clear that the simple construction of a few community houses and an increase in working hours will not change the situation much.
I think it is right to ask ourselves if we still want a family doctor, a doctor who takes care of the health of the family from the smallest to the oldest, if we want a doctor who reaches everyone and leaves no one behind (how would it have been possible to vaccinate people more fragile, the elderly bedridden without us family doctors?). More than a reflection on the relationship between hospital and territory, which for too long has been lacking without an organic address, needs to be done. The role of the district which has been defined for too long and understaffed must be recovered, as indeed are the Sanitation and Public Health Services (Sisp).
It is a game of massacre that we are witnessing, a game in which the shortcomings due to years of defining the NHS are attributed to the doctors.
As a family doctor from the deep province, I think I express the feelings of many colleagues in saying that we feel humiliated and mocked by a policy that, in order to save itself, unloads its own failure on those who work well beyond their strength.
In this party game, the citizen’s interest has no voice and in a populist way we continue to believe that nothing has changed and that our NHS continues to provide services as before when it is now evident from the North and South that they are waiting for visits. they have become biblical, the interventions are mostly suspended and if you want answers you have to resort to private.
I think the time has come to put aside personal interests and work for the common good.
Ornella Mancin
Doctor of general medicine
04 February 2022
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