Escape from hospitals, 40,000 specialists risk disappearing

Pubblicato il 29/11/2016 – PAOLO RUSSO – LA STAMPA ITALIA

After a temporary vocational crisis, young people have started pushing again to enter medical faculties, but between hiring freezes and too limited numbers in the even more sought-after specialization schools, over the next ten years, 40,000 white coats risk disappearing from our hospitals . A desertification of clinics and wards which, together with the other 16,000 family doctors missing within seven years, risks throwing our health care system into a tailspin. Also because those missing will be above all surgeons, gynecologists, paediatricians, internists, specialties which cannot be done without.

The alarm on the flight from Italian hospitals is raised by a study conducted by Anaao, the strongest trade union in the category, ready to go on strike during the holidays if the government does not put concrete proposals on the plate to stem the problem and money to renew a contract that has been at stake for seven years.

Meanwhile, the numbers of the study speak for themselves: between 2021 and 2015, from the current approximately ten thousand exits a year, there will be over 5,600 retirements, because the doctors who are children of the baby boom will hang up their lab coats. Thus, in a decade, 47,300 hospital specialists plus 8,200 university and outpatient specialists will retire. In all, an exodus of 55,500 doctors. And since the partial freeze on hiring is in force, which allows only one out of four white coats to be replaced, it means that 40,000 doctors will be missing. Not even to say that the allocations of the latest stability law will be used to contain the losses, given that they are used to stabilize seven thousand precarious workers who are already working and not to hire a new workforce. The same goes for the three thousand recruitments planned last year by the Government, almost all of which are at a standstill because the majority of the regions have been careful not to present data on their needs.

So in our hospitals there is a shortage of doctors and more and more gray hair. Already today, almost half of them, 48.7% to be exact, are over 55 years old, with the over-60s above the 20% mark while young people between 30 and 34 are just 1.7%. "No one has older doctors than us in Europe and in the world we are second only to Israel", remarked the Deputy National Secretary of Anaao, Carlo Palermo, one of the curators of the still unpublished survey. And not finding outlets in Italy, an increasing number of them pack their coats in their suitcases and emigrate abroad. In 2009, only 369 requested the documentation to be able to operate across the border, they became 1,836 last year. "Each of them cost around 150,000 euros for training, it's like saying that we give away 1,800 Ferraris a year to other countries," underlined Palermo.

But the shortage and aging of our medical profession are not only the fault of the hiring freezes imposed by the financial institutions in recent years. To do the rest there is also a "training funnel", which in the face of increasingly pressing requests for entry and ever more massive retirements continues to skimp on the places available in specialization schools. Today the doors are open to 6,100 medical graduates while there would be a need for 7,900 a year. As if to say that continuing at this rate in a decade, even if we went back to hiring with both hands, there would still be a shortage of almost 20,000 new specialists to replace those who leave.

Meanwhile, even now those who are there are not enough. The proof comes from the more than seven thousand reports of non-compliance with the stop to exhausting shifts imposed by the European directive on working hours. Complaints that now threaten to launch as many appeals.