The shortage of doctors and personnel in the public health sector is "a national emergency, not just Sardinian".
The president of the Region Christian Solinas said: "If it is true that the blocking of turnover decided by the previous regional governments has dramatically expanded the shortages of staff in the hospitals and territorial services of the island, it is true that other factors too, common to all the Italian regions, have contributed to accentuate the problem and have laid the foundations for a further worsening of the situation ”.
For years, Solinas stressed, “the problem of the progressive depletion of personnel has been ignored, hiding the dust under the carpet without having the ability to look to the future and intervene on the causes of what would become a serious national problem. On the contrary, we proceeded lightly to an exasperated search for savings, for balanced accounts, for an apparent budgetary consolidation without considering that the price would have been paid by the citizens with an increasingly troubled service, inadequate structures, obsolete equipment, lists waiting and inefficiencies ".
It is a situation "that no longer admits delays or omissions", he continues.
The choice of the limited number in the Faculties of Medicine and in the health professions “largely explains the shortage of staff, and it is for this reason that prompt action must be taken on this aspect. But it is not enough, and above all it is not enough to face the emergency in the short term, given that the length of the course of study determines that a young person who is enrolled in medicine today will be able to practice between 6-9-11 years ”.
THE NUMBERS - The alarm, he says, “is only at the beginning. In Italy, public structures have lost 45 thousand operators in 10 years, of which 10 thousand doctors between hospitals and affiliated companies. And then there is the item retirements: 35,200 are expected by 2027. There will not be enough colleagues to replace them. The result is that in the four-year period ending in 2023, there could be a further deficit of tens of thousands of doctors, the result of the imbalance between retirements and the new trained specialists who are expected to choose to carry out their work in public health ”.
