Health Equity: Any backtracking on home care is unacceptable
The Budget Bill must allocate specific funds to ensure the continuity and expansion of integrated home care in Italia
The PNRR is in its final stages, as are its funding resources. From now on, if we are to ensure the continuity of all the healthcare services established in recent years under the PNRR, concrete and immediate decisions will be needed, starting with the necessary re-funding in the forthcoming Budget Bill.
This is the case, for example, with the entire pillar of local health services: from community centres to community hospitals, from telemedicine to integrated home care (ADI).
New resources for the ADI
With regard to integrated home care, thanks to funding from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), we have gone from 4.6 per cent of people aged over 65 receiving care in 2019 to 11.3 per cent in 2025. This represents a significant increase in the level of service provision and patient intake by regional health authorities, made possible by approximately three billion euros in funding, to which is added one and a half billion for telemedicine – a tool that is also useful for the delivery of integrated home care (ADI). It is now abundantly clear that, if we are to guarantee this level of access to ADI, it will be essential to include the necessary new resources in the forthcoming Budget Bill, whilst also bearing in mind that, in recent years, we have increased the volume of ADI but have not directed it, as we should have done, towards addressing highly complex care needs, and that there is still significant regional variation in the capacity to provide this type of care.
In fact, in 2023, 58.5 per cent of cases involving people aged over 65 were either one-off interventions (GdC 0, where the first and last visits coincide) or care at the lowest level of intensity (CIA Base).
Furthermore, the average total number of hours of support per case has also fallen: between 2022 and 2023, it fell from 18 to 15 hours.
