For years now the language of health has changed its terms. The hospital has become "the Company", the patient is "the client", the doctors are "the prescribers". Pharmaceutical company managers, at least the scholarly-speaking ones, say you need to have small, focused business units. And the people who make decisions need to be as close to the customers as possible. Because the way in which the customer's need must be satisfied is always different from country to country, even from continent to continent.
In Europe there are "the consumers" who actually use the products, the governments who pay and the doctors who prescribe.
Each of the three actors has a role. The budget limits, in Europe, are serious, but not such as to hinder, especially in Italy, situations of "prescriptive anomalies" at the various levels of the supply chain, such as to "force" the authorities in charge of safeguarding health and spending, to initiate judicial investigations that have little or no point to do with health.
In our country this is an old topic. The multiple complaints of the Italian Association of Scientific Drug Representatives made in institutional bodies such as the Italian Parliament, but also through complaints to the (former) labor magistrates and the organization of conventions, conferences, round tables and debates between politicians, business classes , OOSS and media, have been left on the back burner by a sort of connivance worthy of a better cause.
And the Italian legislation on the subject of medicines should not be forgotten. The strictest ever in the world. Produced, not without effort, by our association. It was enough just to apply it to see the effects. But someone put sand in the gears and the system broke.
And, in the meantime, health care costs have risen exponentially, making us fear the worst about the possibility of treating citizens of a civilized country with dignity, as we would like ours to be.
One of the last but certainly not the last monsters, born of the ruling classes (?) of our country, is called "regionalization of the health system": twenty regions, twenty health systems. Total chaos, to use moderate terminology."
We've also had difficult moments in the past, but now the situation is critical": lo
