Dear manager,
between health and health there should be a virtuous relationship in view of the good of the sick person, but we know how demanding it has always been in terms of objective effectiveness and personal perception. The competence of those who care is fundamental, well expressed in university and specialist training, but the experience in the field is then decisive and varied in the result, both at hospital and territorial level.
Lately, a creeping malaise among operators, exacerbated by the pandemic, has exploded in the so-called ‘medical question’: a crisis of identity and role of the profession within the health reform process that the funds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan allow to implement. Conflict, mistrust and disaffection affect many sectors, from the emergency room to general medicine, with the risk of abandoning active roles, lack of interest, deserted competitions. The question is real, it requires an answer in personal choices and must be addressed in the political and institutional sphere.
However, the demand that new and old needs of the patient pose to the professional in terms of listening and authentic relationship is growing in an increasingly overwhelming way. A need for meaning in the fragmentary and hyper-technological response to diagnosis and treatment that often translates into: ‘But you, who know me well, what do you advise me to do?’. Faced with this gap, in a healthcare reality oriented to profit and efficiency of services, when the disease appears serious and lacerating, the risk of loneliness and mutual incommunicability is real. How can we fill this void and provide human rather than technical answers? The commitment of the individual operator is not enough and must be placed in an interdisciplinary perspective, capable of welcoming the sick person in their entirety: a space for listening, time and words only possible within a therapeutic mosaic.
A dialogue and a winning challenge that a medical psychologist and a chaplain of the Istituto dei Tumori of Milan – Carlo Alfredo Clerici and Don Tullio Proserpio – propose to the healthcare world in a very recent book that is a source of profound inspiration ( Spirituality in treatment, St. Paul). The health reform that is taking shape could favor this prospect not only in oncological treatments but also in the vast world of degenerative diseases, the fragility and complexity of the elderly population in progressive increase.
Will hospitals be able to decline the excellence of care in places with a human face? Will the nascent Community Houses be able to ensure on the territory those primary care capable of multi-specialist integration, prevention, social assistance? It is urgent to think of a new vision of care that reaffirms the value of a universal health service, where the health worker is the main subject called to provide care, while the role of governance and economic sustainability. The doctor is, therefore, a subject to be trained and ‘protected’, orienting him towards innovative tasks and a treatment that does not end in the application of protocols and virtual computer relationships. The challenge is open and cultural change requires everyone’s contribution to build a new sustainable healthcare that respects all human needs.
Doctor, Amci president of Milan