The most shocking incident was recently caused by a dramatic incident in the southern Italian city of Foggia. Hospital staff had to barricade themselves in a room to escape the angry relatives and friends of 23-year-old Natasha, who died during surgery. Photos of the hospital staff moving a sofa and a chest of drawers to close the door went viral on social media and news sites. This episode was followed by two more in the same city: an 18-year-old patient assaulted three emergency room nurses, and the son of one of the patients punched two nurses and a security guard.
Recently, doctors have begun to call their work nothing less than a “battlefield” – and rightly so. Of all workplace emergencies in Italy, 30 percent occur in healthcare facilities. In 2023, there were around 16,000 attacks on doctors. According to surveys, 81 percent of healthcare workers have been attacked at least once during their working career. It is also noted that violence against doctors and nurses in half of the cases (51.3 percent) is committed directly by patients, while patients’ relatives are responsible for 43.3 percent of the incidents. According to the hospital doctors’ union Anaao Assomed, 75.4 percent of the victims are female doctors.
According to many observers, behind these statistics lies a whole complex of long-standing and interrelated problems. Italy’s National Health Service is going through one of the most dramatic periods in its history. Doctors, who were admired and considered national heroes during Covid, no longer feel like an untouchable elite. Local doctors are increasingly complaining about burnout, physical fatigue, irritability and health problems. According to the Fnomceo Association, 9 out of 10 employees complain of excessive stress. Most often it is caused by extremely anxious and persistent patients who, since the pandemic, have acquired the habit of bothering doctors at inopportune times – early in the morning and late at night.
The average Italian doctor earns 1,600 euros a month. This money is “eaten up” by high inflation, the need to support a family and often by renting housing. These working conditions are forcing Italian doctors to leave their jobs en masse. Moreover, if older doctors retire early, young specialists leave for other countries, where they will receive incomparably high salaries. Not to mention the fact that the growing number of attacks on doctors certainly discourages young professionals who prefer to choose safer professions.
Looking at the situation from the perspective of patients, a certain cause-effect relationship can also be traced in their behaviour. Funding cuts have made the National Health Service very difficult to access for ordinary people who do not have the financial means to benefit from the private healthcare that the government is actively promoting. Catastrophic shortages of staff working under conditions of extreme stress, of equipment and of medicines lead to serious delays in the provision of care and long waiting lists (in some cases up to a year), leading to irritation and not always an adequate response from patients and their relatives.
To avoid a total collapse, the president of the National Federation of Italian Doctors, Filippo Anelli, has called for the army to be involved in protecting hospitals and asked Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni to use EU funds earmarked for the fight against coronavirus to ensure safety in hospitals. As a preventive measure, a bill was recently introduced in the Italian Senate according to which aggressive patients would be deprived of the right to receive free medicines for three years.
