'The health plan will try to reduce the gaps'

"The large hospitals treat the most complex cases, and therefore that towards them is often a physiological mobility, because if for that type of pathology that treatment is only guaranteed in 4-5 facilities in Italy, it is natural that patients go knocking there. This is why we need to encourage the creation of large centres even in the South, where there are too few, thus strengthening this hospital backbone close to all citizens'. Americo Cicchetti is the director of health programming at the Ministry of Health and has always been aware of the vices and virtues of our health system - first as a researcher, now as a doctor - as shown, for example, by the recently published data on hospital admissions, which last year reached almost 8 million.

Gaps are the great evil of the NHS. How are they reduced?

As Minister Schillaci often repeats, we must focus on equity and equal access to care. This is a priority that we will try to pursue with the new National Health Plan on the scaffolding of which we are working these days and which we count on approving at the end of the year with a three-year or five-year duration so as to link it to the budget law for resources.

But with what interventions?

We want to share with the regions the idea of governing certain issues centrally as well. For example, the treatment of rare diseases: today we only have reference centres at national level in some regions because you cannot expect them to be everywhere. That is why the network of services for patients must be more national. Also on the issue of mobility, we are thinking of a single budget at a central level, a sort of national fund to manage that mobility of patients from one region to another that is inevitable, a bit like what has been done for the budget of innovative drugs that is managed at Aifa. We also want to aim for fairer resource allocation criteria.