An Opportunity to Relaunch Italian Health Care
"Response to COVID-19: was Italy (un)prepared?" is not just the question that citizens and companies have been asking themselves for months. It is also the title of the study that traces the history of Italian health care, analyzes the impact of the pandemic both on the supply side of services and on the demand needs of patients and, above all, proposes ideas to relaunch Italy's national health system. The study by Iris Bosa (Business School, University of Edinburgh) and others, including Oriana Ciani of CERGAS, SDA Bocconi School of Management, and Simone Ghislandi and Amelia Compagni of Bocconi University, presents a detailed map with numbers and regulatory references that leads the reader to understand certain questions. Why, for instance, has a decentralized regional approach not proved optimal to handle infections (given that the spread of the virus caused the postponement of 50,552 medical operations for other conditions at the peak of the crisis)? Or why are there regions that have invested more than others to create a widespread network of so-called USCAs, rapid medical intervention units in towns and cities?
To have international terms of comparison, the survey published by Health Economics, Policy and Law is part of a "broader work conducted by the academics that are part of the European Health group, which is investigating the health policies of various countries, from the United States to New Zealand, from China to Israel (www.cambridge.org)," explains Ciani. "The work horizon of this survey is, instead, that of identifying which interventions are now a priority for reorganizing the Italian health system. Among these are the necessity of adequate funding over time, greater attention to prevention and to territorial and primary care, in particular." These would avoid the burden of emergency situations falling only on the shoulders of hospitals, which should rely, in parallel, on a strengthened network of general practitioners, without neglecting a more homogeneous territorial distribution of public multifunctional health centers.
"It is true that Covid-19 has accelerated the use of innovative technologies in healthcare, starting from tele-visits and more generally from the use of tele-medicine. This is a first step that is driving the situation from an organizational point of view and the training of skills, both among healthcare professionals and the patients themselves," concludes Ciani. "Italy was lagging behind on the path of digitization; now the time has come to catch up."
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