Threats, verbal aggression and the last act of intimidation: a bullet in the mailbox. It is the nightmare that a doctor is living in Vicenza. Tired of the succession of these episodes, now the family doctor wants to leave. And on the case intervenes the Fnomceo, National Federation of the Orders of Surgeons and Dentists. The leaders of the Italian white coats say they are "deeply embittered by the heavy and repeated threats received by the colleague who, after being verbally assaulted several times by patients and having found a case in the mailbox, is thinking of abandoning the profession. We are close to our colleague, who had to clash with this reality at the very beginning of her professional career, and to the whole Order of Vicenza", comments the president of Fnomceo, Filippo Anelli.
The young doctor still attends the specific training course for general medicine, but already has 1,200 patients, thanks to a law wanted by Veneto to make up for the shortage of family doctors, and tells local newspapers a reality made of screams, offenses, death threats, reads the note of Fnomceo. So much so that he doubted his professional future. "There are more and more doctors who say enough - highlights Anelli - who abandon a profession that becomes more difficult every day, due to unsustainable working conditions. In the hospital, in the doctor's clinics and now, even of family doctors. Doctors attacked, threatened, subjected to physical and psychological violence".
"Hospital doctors forced to endless shifts - continues the list of President Fnomceo - family doctors who respond until late in the evening to patients' requests and, when they have to be absent even for a day, do not find a replacement. Doctors denounced, in most cases unjustly, who spend years under the pressure of a trial, before being acquitted". An unease, he underlines, "so deep as to lead to mobilization to claim respect for the dignity of professional practice, as happened in Bari, where over a thousand doctors took to the streets. For this reason we appreciated the sensitivity shown by the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci, to increase the National Health Fund, to reduce the gap between funding and health spending that now stood at 133 billion last year ".