Doctors' criminal shield 'frozen': white coats promise battle

The doctors' criminal shield? There has been talk for years of stabilising it, at the great request of the white coats - who obtained it with Covid in order to be able to carry out their work with greater serenity during the extremely difficult period of pandemic management - but who claim that it is necessary in their everyday working lives, affected as they are by thousands of lawsuits that in the vast majority of cases (97%) end in nothing but contribute to alienating them from public health and the most risky specialisations. And which cost an estimated €10 billion.

Well, the implementation of this measure, the last extension of which will expire at the end of the year, with an amendment to the penal code providing for the punishability of the doctor for death or injury only in the case of wilful misconduct or gross negligence, seemed to be one step away from being reached in the last Council of Ministers before the summer break. It came out a black smoke and so it will be for the Council of Ministers meeting at the end of August when it seemed 'papable': the measure has been frozen and who knows whether the tensions of recent weeks related to the appointment and then the revocation by Health Minister Schillaci of the experts of Nitag, the Committee of Experts on vaccines in which two strongly contested exponents were included.

That session of 5 August had not come to terms with the two versions of the 'shield' that appeared in the Health Professions Bill, the result of the different visions of the Ministry of Health led by Orazio Schillaci and that of Justice headed by Carlo Nordio. The former, aligned to the approach followed during Covid and aimed at a stabilisation of the instrument, the latter richer in distinctions, influenced by the multi-year work of the Commission of experts that - without succeeding - should have brought to Parliament a comprehensive reform of medical malpractice. In the text, the Nordio version hypothesised, among other things, that the shield could only be activated in cases of 'special difficulty' in healthcare activities. In any case, punishability is excluded when the recommendations set out in the guidelines or good clinical-assistance practices are complied with.

Result: nothing done. The failure to reach an agreement on the only article of the enabling bill that would have made the stabilisation of the shield immediately operative has 'frozen' the entire measure, a text in its entirety eagerly awaited in view of the crisis that has been transversally denounced by the entire healthcare workforce: In the draft bill, attached to the 2024 budget law, in order to strengthen the NHS by increasing its appeal to professionals, the government is delegated to adopt one or more legislative decrees by 31 December 2026, based on a proposal by the Minister of Health in agreement with the PA, the MEF, Justice, University and Research, following an agreement in the State-Regions Conference.

Today, the penal shield remains hung up on yet another extension, to the satisfaction of the doctors. As Pierino Di Silverio, national secretary of the hospitalists' union Anaao-Assomed, points out, 'An umpteenth stop would mean starting the season in the worst possible way and we will find ways to make it clear to the entire population that this government has an exclusively populist attitude that prefers to the health of citizens a handful of votes recovered by winking at the no vax. We were expecting the shield before the summer,' he recalls, 'but apparently it remains off the agenda. We hope that it will not be postponed any further and above all we brand the Nordio version as unacceptable, worsening what is already a penal shield with many limitations and which for us can only represent the basis of a reform that we have been waiting for for a long time'.