“With the DPEF approved today – underlined the Minister of Health Livia Turco – we have confirmed our commitment to strengthen our health system. With more resources for structural investments, with more attention to the new health needs of non self-sufficient elderly people, for the development of the primary care network and with the promotion of dental assistance, also launching new forms of supplementary assistance.
But we have also tackled the issue of job insecurity and the enhancement of healthcare personnel as part of a more general process of modernizing the healthcare system based on the quality and safety of care. All within a framework of renewed economic stability of the NHS, the result of the previous finance law, the health pact and regional recovery plans from the health deficit.
On these bases we will also face the complete revision of the cost-sharing system in the name of fairness with reference to the real economic conditions of citizens and we have laid the foundations for a new drug policy, capable of combining the appropriateness of expenditure with the relaunch of research and scientific innovation.
In short, the DPEF Sanitary now puts the work of relaunching Italian public health launched by the Government into full swing, also directly involving citizens through constant forms of monitoring their satisfaction with the services received".
Here is a summary of the parts concerning health of the DPEF 2008/2011.
There has been a stabilization of NHS health expenditure compared to GDP, thus highlighting the effectiveness of the containment measures envisaged by the 2007 budget and by the regional plans for the repayment of the health debt.
We also underline the Government's willingness to strengthen the system reorganization actions already identified in the previous DPEF and aimed at:
1. the updating of the essential levels of assistance (LEA), overcoming obsolete services and enhancing services of high social importance. In this context, the 43 DRGs (Diagnosis related groups) at high risk of inappropriateness are being reviewed;
2. the implementation of a monitoring system through an adequate 'package' of indicators;
3. the modernization of the health system focused on the enhancement of human resources, starting with doctors and health personnel also aiming to complete the process, started with the 2007 Budget, of overcoming the phenomenon of precariousness;
4. the reorganization and strengthening of the primary care network by promoting advanced forms of association between doctors and integration with the activity of the health districts;
5. the reorganization of the hospital network and rationalization of the purchasing systems for goods and services;
6. a program for the permanent promotion of the quality of the NHS by monitoring the satisfaction of the services by the citizen-users.
Within the limits of available resources, the Government considers it important to accompany these actions with some interventions aimed at enhancing their effects:
1. with the adjustment of the resources available for the co-financing of investments in healthcare construction and technological innovation;
2. with the reform of the regulatory system of the pharmaceutical sector, with the aim both of guaranteeing a more adequate control of spending and of offering companies a new price regulation structure which gives them certainty and creates a market context more favorable to competition and innovation and more incentive for investments in research and development in our country;
