Orazio Schillaci, Italy’s Minister of Health, highlighted his alarm today about the country’s apparent deficit of educated workers in the health sector, particularly doctors, calling for immediate action.
Speaking to the press during an event hosted at the University of Pisa for the launch of the academic year, Schillaci said it is frightening ‘the number of contracts that have not been signed or that have been abandoned, especially in the domain of emergency medicine’.
The minister described this phenomenon as ‘a real drain of young doctors’ and announced an investment plan aimed at creating the conditions for them to see the National Health System as attractive again, so that working in public health is rewarding from both an economic and professional point of view’.
‘There is a strong commitment with universities to offer young doctors a future of growth and quality in Italy,’ stated the Health Minister, adding that ‘we are addressing the issue of scholarships for specialist schools’.
Schillaci stated in February 2015 that “between 2005 and 2015, more than 10,000 doctors left Italy to work in foreign countries,” an issue that persists.
That is a ‘human capital outflow that we cannot afford,’ he said the minister, adding that it contributes to the current deficit through’short-sighted programming of the number of entrants to the Faculty of Medicine, which does not respond to the country’s true needs.
He also noted that ‘it is a priority to act in order to stop what we may identify as a genuine loss of some medical specializations’, a phenomena that he claimed ‘is taking on worrying dimensions, especially in the area of emergency care’.