They are three hundred and four. Not all of them are young, but they are ready not to kill, but to relaunch the profession.: “We are no longer doctors than the health insurance company.” They bet on teamwork, on alliances with specialists, on technology. Those enrolled in the training course for general practitioners are the new generation of healthcare professionals in Lombardy. That, of course, lives moments of great difficulty, as told in these pages. There are few white coats (370 missing in the Milan area alone) and they will continue to fall: the peak of retirements is expected for 2025. The complexity of the patients to be treated increases as does the bureaucracy, the computer tools that should help often get in the way, the conflict with the patients grows.
At the same time, there are positive experiences. Starting, precisely, from those who choose to follow this career. Of the 464 places available in the last selection, 304 were assigned, 66%. Very few According to Anna Carla Pozzi, provincial secretary of the Fimmg Milano union: “Their salary is half that of postgraduates, the course must be made more attractive and transferred to the university.” A good group, however, for Alessandro Rubino, a family doctor who coordinates the Polis Lombardia course (a regional body): «If it were a specialty, it would be the one with the most students. And those who attend are convinced of the choice. Indeed, there are those who have already been hired at the hospital and leave to open a studio in the area. This can be understood from the numbers: 27% of “newbies” are over 40, 9% over 50. The process lasts three years, but you can work from the beginning, even if it is under the supervision of a tutor and with a small number of patients.. The prospects? Many choose “group medicine”, or join a clinic with other colleagues, a secretary, a nurse. “So you can have the studio open all day,” says Pozzi again. Sustaining costs is not always easy. “Current expenses are so onerous that up to 60% of the gross is eroded between taxes and social security contributions,” according to Andrea Mangiagalli, president of the Libera association of general medicine. But working as a team reduces the risk of burnout and helps the patient.
exist then collaborative experiments with specialists from Community Houses, as happens in District 9: family doctors can send patients who have an emergency to cardiologists, diabetologists, allergists of Villa Marelli, thanks to the “priority agenda”. “The more alliances there are, the more efficient you can be”, says Luca Manganiello, coordinator of the group of doctors in the area. Even so, there are experiences of telemonitoring and telemedicine. Above all, we have to rethink the role: “We have to find out what the doctors do and what the auxiliaries, the nurses, practice,” says Rubino. We must rethink the profession from the root.
