The Region's financial statement for 2023 is compliant and regular, but the spending capacity is too low. This is the judgment issued this morning by the judges of the Joint Sections of the Court of Auditors in a public hearing, before the representative of the regional council of Alessandra Todde, the Budget assessor, Giuseppe Meloni and the president of the Budget commission of the Regional Council, Alessandro Solinas.

The budget balances were respected, but there was no shortage of scolding and warnings from the reporting magistrates Cristina Ragucci and Lucia Marra and the regional prosecutor Maria Elisabetta Locci. The administrative surplus is approximately 3,800 million euros and, net of the amounts set aside, tied up and earmarked, remains positive and stands at approximately 530 million euros. The cash fund is also positive.

Results that, in sharp increase compared to the 2022 financial year, «could at first glance lead to a positive assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of management» , writes Attorney Locci, but considered together with the «percentage worsening of collections and payments, lead to a completely different conclusion».

The excessive resources in the coffers also highlight the poor spending and planning capacity this year. The list of critical issues is long and the judgment is heavy: "The Region has not appropriately invested the resources available and has not ensured the related services", underlines the prosecutor Locci in her closing speech, "it has shown significant difficulties in the activity that regulates, in cascade, all the others, namely the planning". And still too many budget variations "which have practically distorted the original allocations" during the financial year. Not only that, for the accounting magistrates, the Region in 2023, under the leadership of the center-right of Christian Solinas, has not completed the reorganization process, with the simplification of rules and procedures and "has a plethora of structures and bodies, poorly communicating with each other, with a fragmented or sectoral distribution of competences".

Once again the rebuke for the recourse to provisional exercise, once again, "a hypothesis foreseen by the legal system in exceptional cases which for the regional administration is becoming the rule".

Healthcare, with its missed expenses and deficient cascade services, is one of the focuses on which the analysis of the Court of Auditors focused.

The picture that emerges from the checks shows that "on the one hand, adequate services are not provided to citizens, in terms of time and methods", underlined the regional prosecutor Maria Elisabetta Locci in her closing speech, "and on the other, the largest part of the resources allocated for this purpose are kept unused".

An example is the Covid Funds, for which sums equal to 46.97% of the total transfers are set aside in the balance sheets of the Local Health Authorities as of December 31, 2023, "just as the sums earmarked for financing the "Waiting List Plan" are set aside in the amount of 44.90% at the end of the 2023 financial year", he specifies. The critical issues already encountered last year remain: the approval of the Local Health Authorities' balance sheets with a two-year delay, the failure to operate some tools, the aftermath of the accounting systems adopted by the Local Health Authorities and Ares, with times that have lengthened to now four years since the birth of the Regional Health Authority".

Magistrate Cristina Ragucci goes into detail, highlighting the "persistence of multiple critical issues relating to long waiting lists, the lack of doctors, including general practitioners and pediatricians of free choice, hospitals and beds, deserted competitions, specializations without registered members and the management of emergency rooms".

On waiting times, the rapporteur highlights that the 8 million allocated in 2022 to reduce them «have remained almost entirely unused».

And then the overcrowding in the Emergency Departments due to the disproportion between the healthcare demand (number of patients waiting and in charge) and the available logistical, instrumental and professional resources. A financial management that is reflected in the inability of the healthcare companies to spend. The judgment is harsh: the Court of Auditors "believes it must underline that the failure to provide healthcare services in compliance with an adequate timing is the paradigm of the difficulties of the regional healthcare system " and multiplies "the attractive force of private healthcare, risking compressing the constitutionally protected right to health".

(Online Union)

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