From the Nas Carabinieri to the Police: healthcare without antibodies defends itself against irregularities and abuses

We can define it as the 'militarisation of healthcare': by this we mean the recurrent phenomenon of calling in the forces of law and order to help healthcare companies, not for specific institutional tasks of the forces of law and order themselves, but for facts of a managerial nature to which the company structures deputed to them are unable to provide solutions, either because of the absolute abnormality of the situations, or - much more often, unfortunately - because of their inability or unwillingness to resolve them.

We can cite, for the past, the cases of the memorandum of understanding between the Lombardy Region and the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Health for an operational collaboration to control and monitor waiting lists at public and private providers. And dating back to 2019 is the agreement between the Lazio Region and the Guardia di Finanza (Finance Police) to oversee the drawing of lots for competitions to be held by primary school teachers. It should also be recalled that in November 2022, a Nas investigation was carried out throughout Italy to verify the regularity of contracts and the way in which NHS facilities recruit so-called 'tokenists'.

At the beginning of December, two reports appeared in the press that relate to the unpleasant phenomenon mentioned above. The stories are somewhat different because one is of absolutely general significance, while the other concerns the case of a single individual. Nonetheless, both had a great media resonance and constitute in the eyes of public opinion yet another really unnecessary blow to the NHS.

The first episode concerned an accredited facility in the Lombardy Region - and a very famous one at that - where on Wednesday, 10 December, the Nas carabinieri intervened in a hospital ward to investigate what had happened between 5 and 7 December, when some nurses from an external cooperative allegedly made mistakes that put 'patients at very high risk'. According to press reports, the professional reliability of the cooperative was very low. And the political comment that this was a 'physiological criticality' certainly does not improve the embarrassment that the episode generated. The professionalism and performance of the nurses should be the responsibility of the health management, the nursing coordinators and, upstream, the personnel offices; certainly not the Carabinieri. The circumstance that this is a private facility owned by the largest private hospital group in Italy does not change the terms of the issue, because for citizens and for the purposes of care, it is equated in every respect with public facilities, since healthcare accreditation is the measure by which the status of potential providers of healthcare services within and on behalf of the SSN is recognised.

The other news, which is really striking, concerns an engineer manager dismissed by a health company who on 5 December showed up at work anyway, and unduly, contesting the dismissal procedure. The strategic management had to call the police, who accompanied the manager out of the company offices. It is unthinkable to go into the merits of what happened, because it is abundantly clear that the issue is a delicate one, and the narratives gleaned from the newspapers are necessarily generic or incomplete in order to be able to know the motives of the counterparts.