Prof. Gabriele Pelissero, National President of the Italian Association of Private Hospitals (AIOP), spoke on the TV channel l’Aria che Tira on 6 August 2024
Private healthcare facilities are an integral part of the Italian National Health Service
The vast majority of the activity carried out by private healthcare facilities in Italy is totally included in the public National Health Service (NHS). Any reduction of funding does serious damage to both public and private healthcare structures that work for the NHS.
‘It is true’, Pelissero added, ‘that there is a pure private offer in this country, I would like to emphasise however, that at least 95 per cent of Italian healthcare is within the perimeter of the National Health Service where there are approximately 72 per cent of activities carried out by public law operators and 28 per cent by private law operators. This is the real situation in the country’.
On the issue of the migration abroad of Italian doctors, then, the AIOP President said: ‘The most serious problem in our country does not lie so much in the phenomenon of doctors who prefer to move abroad, which all things considered does not constitute a huge quota compared to the entire system, but rather depends on having wrongly planned the production of doctors for 30 years. It is a very serious problem,’ said Pelissero, who concluded: ’we have produced not enough doctors and above all not enough specialists. This is an error that we have repeatedly denounced for years, and it can be traced back to the closed number of universities and the scarcity of specialisation places. This is the real medical crisis in our country’.
Information published on the AIOP website
