3' min read
3' min read
Compared to other regions in southern Italy, the Basilicata Region has the advantage of having 'free' resources, that is, resources that are part of its autonomous budget and that allow it greater margins of management autonomy than those with fewer resources to add to those agreed upon by the State. It is this that has made it possible to avoid the commissioner of Lucanian healthcare by resorting to environmental compensation agreements between the Basilicata Region and oil companies to finance the 'Development Project for a new organisational model of the regional healthcare network in a One Health perspective'. A proximity-based territorial assistance aimed at bringing the answers to health needs as close as possible to the citizens of Lucania, avoiding health migration, curbing the depopulation of inland areas, and fostering the development of induced activities linked to the welfare sector.
A 2023-2025 multi-year project, launched in 2023, which tends to maximise the organisational capacities introduced by Lucania's public health agencies with the consequent enhancement of territorial, scientific research, technological and employment activities in the provision of services, filling with content all those facilities financed with a substantial investment under the NRP, ranging from the construction of Community Homes, to Community Hospitals, to Territorial Operating Centres that would otherwise have remained a sort of empty boxes.
But the Region's decision to use oil resources to plug the healthcare emergency has aroused controversy by animating the last election campaigns, proving that healthcare has always been a political warhorse. Very heated tones that reintroduce the theme of planning, without which it is impossible to plan and consequently manage expenditure. Hence the urgency of a new regional social and health plan, on which the Region is working. This is what the trade unions are calling for, urging a Health Care Table. "The health of the Lucanians must be made safe and to do so,' said Vincenzo Tortorelli and Antonio Guglielmi, regional secretaries of Uil and UilFpl, 'there is a need to get to grips with the Plan and to speed up the interventions and projects envisaged by the Pnrr'.
'One cannot think,' added the general secretary of the Fp CGIL, Giuliana Scarano, 'of reversing the course of a regional health service only through cold accounting. Many Lucanians give up treatment or go outside the region to be treated, bringing Basilicata to the penultimate place among the regions for compliance with the Essential Levels of Care (LEA). Dramatic is also the data on the employment trend of health personnel, which dropped by 11.7 per cent from 2013 to 2022'.
"Rocco Paternò, president of the Order of Physicians of the Province of Potenza, reiterated, 'There are many critical points, all of which can be traced back to the lack of a regional health plan: from the serious shortage of staff that does not allow patients' needs to be met, to the health emigration linked to the structural and human capital shortages, once the pride of the entire health system. And again, the atavistic problem of waiting lists that has not been resolved with the latest government measure'.
