Doctors’ and nurses’ unions in Italy have called for authorities to consider bringing the army into hospitals in response to an increase in attacks by patients and their relatives that provoked outrage across the country.
In one of the latest, captured on video and widely shared on social media, doctors and nurses were forced to barricade themselves in a room at the Policlinico hospital in Foggia, in the southern region of Puglia, on Friday after about 50 relatives and friends of a 23-year-old woman who died after an emergency operation turned on medical staff. Some healthcare workers were injured, with bloodstains visible on the emergency room floor.
Two days later, the same hospital reported another attack, with a patient kicking and punching three emergency room nurses. Then on Tuesday, also in Puglia, a patient assaulted a doctor at the Francesco Ferrari hospital in Casarano, near Lecce.
Two other physical attacks were reported this week in the province of Naples, where health workers said patients and their families turned on emergency room doctors after being asked to wait their turn. In August in Palermo, a relative of a patient punched a volunteer at the Termini Imerese hospital.
Antonio De Palma, the national president of the Nursing Up union, said he was shocked at the surge in violence. “In the past 10 years, such an escalation of brutality had never been documented,” he said. “We have never reached such a level of danger and aggressiveness. We urgently call on the minister of the interior to address the seriousness of this situation. It has become imperative to consider deploying the army in healthcare facilities. We can no longer wait.”
The National Federation of Orders for Nursing Professions (Fnopi) condemned the “criminal actions” against healthcare personnel as “intolerable” and called for protection from the authorities to ensure a safe working environment.
Loreto Gesualdo, the president of the Italian Federation of Medical-Scientific Societies (Fism), has proposed legislation to suspend free access to medical care for three years for those who assault healthcare workers or damage health facilities.
Fism reported more than 16,000 verbal and physical attacks against doctors and nurses in Italian hospitals in 2023 alone.
Last year, a 62-year-old man was sentenced to 16 years in prison for murdering a doctor in 2022 with an axe outside the Policlinico San Donato hospital in Milan because, he claimed, the treatments he had prescribed had been useless.
The director of the Policlinico hospital in Foggia, Giuseppe Pasqualone, told the Guardian the facility was now on the brink of closure. “If we continue down this path, there is a real risk of having to shut down the emergency department due to the dwindling numbers of doctors, nurses, and health workers,” he said.
“Should the emergency department close, the closure of other departments could follow. We ask for the patients and their families to be patient and consider that our doctors and nurses are operating under immense stress caused by the widespread shortage of medical professionals in our hospital, much like many other Italian hospitals. If we add to this the fear among our healthcare workers, we risk losing even more health workers willing to work in our facility.”
Many of the assaults are caused by the shortage of hospital staff and family members’ frustration at the resulting long waiting times for surgery and consultations.
According to the doctors’ union ANAAO, until 2022 almost half of positions in emergency medicine were vacant. Salary-cap legislation over the past two decades to curb public spending has kept salaries low, and work schedules are punishing. For many Italian medical staff, the Covid pandemic was the tipping point, accelerating an exodus abroad. Spending plans published by Giorgia Meloni’s government envisage further healthcare cuts.
In 2023, according to the Forum delle Società Scientifiche dei Clinici Ospedalieri e Universitari Italiani, there was a shortage of approximately 30,000 doctors in Italy. Between 2010 and 2020, 111 hospitals and 113 emergency rooms closed.
