Ssn

Waiting lists, improvements in 16 regions

Regions speed up examinations and examinations to be guaranteed to citizens in the shortest time possible, but major anomalies remain, such as the 85.5% of services that can be provided in four months recorded in Basilicata

by Barbara Gobbi

29 May 2026

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

To look at the glass half full, the system is moving. Not only compared to the substantial stalemate that lasted almost half a century, but also looking back to a year and a half ago.

Considering instead what remains to be done, and especially in terms of appropriateness and responsiveness, there is a lot to roll up one's sleeves, given that in the first months of this year, 2 million examinations and examinations were 'punctured' out of approximately 12.5 million bookings recorded by the National Platform for Waiting List Monitoring.

What is certain is that the platform, established at the National Agency for Regional Health Services (Agenas) by law (Dl 73/2024), is gaining momentum and for the first time allows a nationwide measurement of what is the first woe experienced by citizens when interfacing with the National Health Service.

After a slow start, today we have arrived at the 2.0 dashboard, 'in the clear' also for users, where we give an account of theregional performance for first specialist visits and for 22 groups of diagnostic examinations: those envisaged by the 2019-2021 National Plan for Waiting List Governance and ranging from the first cardiological visit to the oncological visit to the oculistics and from a mammogram to a chest CT scan to spirometry.

Examinations that are essentially prescribed daily by the family doctor on the basis of priority criteria that dictate - or at least should do so - the time limit in which each service must be provided.

And that is (always good to remember):
- 3 days for emergencies (class U);
- 10 days for a short wait (class B);
- 30 days for examinations;
- 60 days for class D (deferred) ;
- 120 days for class P (scheduled).

Schillaci: "Operation Transparency"

The platform, even though it can be consulted by citizens, still has the value of a technical-organisational tool. With the increasingly refined publication of data, it is expected that every region and health authority will be stimulated - not only by legal obligation - to do better and better by shortening the timeframe.

Opening the presentation of the new 'dashboard', the Health Minister Orazio Schillaci, who has made the fight against waiting lists his priority, spoke of 'operation transparency'.

"After more than 47 years since the foundation of the SSN Italy has a national platform for managing waiting lists,' he said. 'A half-century gap is finally being filled,' he said.

The minister, who has had more than one reason to clash with the governors since the start of his term of office precisely over the implementation of the law against queues in healthcare, wished to emphasise that 'the collaboration with the regions has never been so intense' and that 'the platform is not intended to be a ranking, but was created to improve the system with a view to transparency'.

Where we are

The Director General of Agenas, Angelo Tanese, drew up the balance: 'Between January 2025 and April 2026, the platform acquired more than 65 million bookings, of which about 32 million for first specialist visits and about 33 million for diagnostic services,' he explained, 'made in the public or accredited private sector.

An already very large database, which will gradually be fed automatically by the Regions' Cups and which finally allows us to read the trend, understand the phenomenon, analyse the critical points and measure the impact of corrective measures.

By the end of 2026, meanwhile, the goal is to achieve full interoperability with the 21 regional Cup platforms and to measure waiting times with a daily data flow'.

RISPETTO DEI TEMPI DELLA PRIMA DISPONIBILITÀ PROPOSTA

Dati in percentuale

Critical nodes

The first critical figure is the one that emerges from the 'point' made by Agenas in April: in the first four months of this year, resuming the logic of the 'glass half empty', there are 2 million requests for services to which the public health service has failed to provide an answer. To be precise, 1.914 million, clarify Agenas.

In detail, 1.3 million examinations and 700,000 examinations, including services that are so crucial that they are also part of the SSN screening, such as colonoscopy, which in the case of urgency is met in only 37% of cases.

If one were to widen the gaze to the year and 4 months of monitoring (from January 2025) that includes the 65 million bookings acquired by the Platform, a spannometric calculation would return a gap of13 million unfulfilled services, poorly counted, between 7 million visits and 5 million 'lost' examinations.

These clearly include - as Managing Director Tanese pointed out - first and foremost those that 'perhaps by just one day' exceed the prescribed priority time.

Data by Region

In the first four months of this year compared to the same period in 2025," the agency, which monitors the situation in real time and has announced a quarterly bulletin on the trend, noted, "there was, however, an improvement nationwide for both examinations and diagnostic tests, across all priority classes.

In particular, for first visits the percentage of compliance with waiting times goes from 76.1% to 78.7%, while for diagnostic examinations it goes from 83% to 84.7%. The improvement concerns above all 'urgent' and 'short' services, testifying to "an intense work in progress in the Regions" and to a system that on the whole "is on the up and up", stressed MD Tanese.

The general picture shows improvement in 16 out of 21 regions, while analysing the data on individual regions, Abruzzo, Trento, Sardinia, Sicily and Valle d'Aosta are worse for first examinations, while Abruzzo, Piedmont, Bolzano, Trento, Sicily and Valle d'Aosta are 'decreasing' for examinations.

Some regions, such as Abruzzo, which overall shows a downward trend, however, record a leap on the U priority class between the first four months of 2025 (76.5%) and the first four months of this year (85.6%), reconfirming the decision to recover precisely where citizens are most urgent.

Too many "programmed"

Among the first anomalies to be corrected is the 'suspicious' attribution of priority codes: in Basilicata the percentage of first visits in class P (deliverable in 120 days) reaches 85.5%, in Campania it exceeds 80%, in Molise it is 71.5% and in Calabria 66.5%, while in Lazio it is 51.4% and downwards.

At the other end of the scale is the figure for Tuscany (7.8%), Piedmont (8.2%), Emilia Romagna (8.8%) and Umbria (13.5%), and 'discussions have been initiated with the regions on this aspect,' Agenas warns.

Then there is the figure that emerges from the analysis of the Health Card System and that is the ratio between prescriptions and bookings actually made, which stops at just over 50 per cent (50.3 per cent first visits and 54.4 per cent examinations), while it is considered 'physiological' that at most 25-30 per cent of prescriptions do not pass through the Cup.

Beyond the choices of individuals, it is clear that, as Agenas points out, very high percentages of missed prescriptions are indicative of some difficulty in booking first visits and prescribed examinations.

On this front for first visits 'perform' worse Abruzzo (33.7%), Lazio (36.2%), Piedmont (45%) and Apulia (46.8%) and for diagnostic examinations Lazio (37.3%), Abruzzo (39.3%), Apulia (43.2%).