Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – "The Delegation Bill (DDL) for the Reform of the National Health Service, approved by the Council of Ministers on January 12, 2026 and expected to be free of charge, has been stalled in the Senate ever since. The Government must therefore provide adequate funding for the law to be truly effective in strengthening integration between hospitals and the community in our country."
This is what the Forum of Scientific Societies of Italian Hospital and University Clinicians (Fossc) claims in a document presented during a webinar and shared by all the presidents of the Forum's scientific societies, a statement reports.
"We believe it is a priority to achieve real and concrete integration between primary and hospital care in Italy," says Francesco Cognetti, coordinator of Fossc. "This is a need that emerged during the difficult years of the pandemic and is increasingly urgent given the general aging of the population.
However, the reform issue falls within the broader context of state defunding of public healthcare, which now presents truly discouraging figures. We rank 19th among all European countries in per capita healthcare spending, even behind the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Poland, and last among the G7 nations.
We are making available to the National Health Service one thousand dollars less for each individual citizen than the European and OECD average – he explains – All of this is causing a profound crisis in which the medical-healthcare workforce is immersed, with a very serious shortage of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals”.
Furthermore, "there are low enrollment rates in some medical specialty schools," observes Cognetti, "including crucially important ones, such as general surgery, pathology, anesthesia and resuscitation, microbiology and virology, clinical pathology, and emergency medicine." We are also witnessing a steady exodus of healthcare workers, especially younger ones, from the public healthcare system to foreign countries or the private sector because they are significantly underpaid compared to their European colleagues and subjected to intolerable working conditions. Meanwhile, in public hospitals, despite the restrictions, the phenomenon of payroll workers persists, which is, after all, the only way to avoid the closure of essential departments and services."
"Without adequate measures, which have been spectacularly lacking thus far," Cognetti emphasizes, "waiting lists will not be reduced, emergency rooms will continue to be clogged with days-long patients waiting to be transferred to acute care wards and/or intensive care units. These transfers are impossible due to the extremely low number of available beds compared to the average population of all other European countries. Public hospitals will be irreversibly weakened, community healthcare will not take off; indeed, the failure of initiatives in this sector, funded with significant, but unfortunately wasted, resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), is increasingly evident. Regional healthcare mobility will continue to increase dramatically, to the detriment of patients in the Southern regions and also in other regions, particularly Lazio."
The public and universal nature of our National Health System "will inevitably be compromised, and the underlying idea that is gaining ground," warns the Fossc coordinator, "is that healthcare can be overwhelmingly handed over to the private system, as is already happening. Naturally, our country has a very strong and consistent presence of accredited private facilities, especially in the Northern Regions, that represent great excellence and must be safeguarded. However, the State must also guarantee the survival of public healthcare, which is currently compromised by extremely low funding levels and is the only system capable of ensuring appropriate care and services for all the most vulnerable patients and indigent citizens."
Under these conditions, "Minister Schillaci's request to include an additional €5 billion in funding for the National Health Service in the next Budget Law for 2027," the statement concludes, "compared to the overall €36 billion difference per year compared to the European and OECD average, appears completely insufficient."
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