Healthcare, Veneto at the top, Calabria last. But the gap is narrowing

The best-performing region in healthcare, Veneto, achieves a maximum performance of 55% of the theoretically achievable maximum, while Calabria, last in the ranking, stands at 23%. The distance from the optimal levels reflects a growing expectation of stakeholders who demand increasingly higher standards; if their satisfaction with the best performance recorded at regional level were to be considered 'full', the best performance (of Veneto) would stand at 69% of the maximum.

This is the finding of the 13th edition of the study on Regional Performance, which analyses the health protection opportunities offered to citizens in the various Italian regions, prepared by Crea Sanità - Centre for Applied Economic Research in Health - of the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata', which will be presented in Rome on 2 July.

The study, which was conducted with the contribution of a panel of 107 stakeholders in the National Health Service, introduced important new features and highlighted significant results by flanking for the first time the Essential Levels of Care to measure the universality and equity of the National Health Service with citizen satisfaction and quality of life in the different Italian regions.

"The results," Crea Sanità explains in anticipation of some of the study's findings, "show a complex picture, characterised by an increase in the expectations of stakeholders, and citizens in particular, and a positive correlation between the performance of health services and the level of citizen satisfaction; there is also a positive, but less strong correlation between performance and perceived quality of life.

In the period 2019-2024, however, there was an improvement in the overall performance index, and analyses also revealed that the gap between the best-performing and the worst-performing regions is narrowing, which is mainly attributable to the fact that the improvements affected the regions of Southern and Central Italy in particular.