Aggressions in healthcare: it is not only with punitive measures that the issue will be resolved

by Pierino Di Silverio

The anger of patients, who feel more and more abandoned to a sad fate, pours on doctors and nurses, innocent front offices, screens of disservices of a health system now in a terminal state, a scapegoat at hand.

12 JAN –

The phenomenon of attacks on healthcare personnel has now reached alarming levels, both in terms of number and severity, with no differences between emergency medical services and hospitals, between regions and cities.

The anger of patients, who feel more and more abandoned to a sad fate, pours on doctors and nurses, innocent front offices, screens of disservices of a health system now in a terminal state, a scapegoat at hand.

Decades of divestments, lack of programming, deconstruction of professionalism, growing disinterest of politics in completely different, busy matters, have contributed to the dissolution of a public health service that is hard to imagine still usable in the near future.

More than 12,000 attacks against healthcare workers in the last 4 years, a trend that not even the law born with difficulty in 2020 has managed to reverse. Also because it is stingy with significant news, beyond the harsher punishment for the aggressors and the establishment of a national observatory on the phenomenon.

Obviously more is needed. We are once again talking about the legal prosecution of all injuries, not only those with a prognosis of more than 20 days, the attribution of public official status to the doctor, the presence of television cameras and the forces of order, or the army, in of care, as a deterrent. Or to ensure psychological support to the relatives of the patients upon their entry, continuous information on waiting times, communication on the control of the parameters.

Certainly useful interventions which, however, would risk not being decisive if isolated or not placed in a context of profound reorganization of the entire patient care system, which requires an economic and professional investment that we do not see today. No-cost reforms, as we know, produce no effects.

The anger of the people, who wait hours in the waiting room for a visit or days in improvised camps for a bed, accentuated by the state of illness which, more or less serious, in any case produces devastating effects on the psychic balance, certainly cannot be governed by purely deterrent or punitive measures.

It should be noted that the doctor-patient relationship, and the very principle of humanizing treatment, have gotten lost in the maze of a systemic crisis made up of shortages, personnel and beds, investments and political attention.

As long as the emergency room will continue to be the only gateway to treatment, as long as the length of the waiting lists will in fact represent the denial of the right to health, until the need for integration between the territories will be understood and hospital, not two distinct and distant silos, but two parts of the same system, as long as there is no courageous investment in personnel and a legislative asset to reform the current model, we will continue to discuss over boarding, improper accesses, resignations and lack of vocations, of treatments transformed into an odyssey. And of verbal and physical aggressions, increasingly violent and harmful to the integrity, not only physical, of the staff, left alone to manage the gap between growing demands from patients and decreasing resources, risking their lives every day in the wards until assuming as a target the return home, unharmed, after each shift.

It won’t be easy, but if the Government and the Minister want to take this path, Anaao will be there and will continue to do its part.

Pierino Di SilverioNational Secretary Anaao Assomed