We have received and published the letter from the FIMMG of Vercelli, an acronym which groups together the family doctors of our province, which denounces and totally disagrees with the request which was sent to them in recent days by the Local Health Authority, for compensation for having prescribed extra medicines during the months of Covid. A truly paradoxical situation if you consider the context in which the heroic family doctors found themselves working, often without any protection (and in fact some of them lost their lives) to save people’s lives during the hard months of Covid . In a situation of suspension of laws and in many cases of people’s rights that Italians have suffered during Covid, the request for compensation for an excess number of prescribed drugs, which refers to legislation referring to a normal health situation, appears at least surreal. (there)
In any case, here is the open letter from FIMMG to bring the case to light so that it can be addressed and resolved:
The FIMMG Provincial Section of Vercelli, following the meeting convened on 02/05/2024, with the unanimity of the doctors present, in reference to the request for payment for over-prescriptions of drugs relating to the year 2020 by the ASL of Vercelli, HE TOTALLY DISAGREES.
We find this request completely inappropriate given the historical period examined, in which the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic raged with extreme violence. It must be remembered that at that time many state laws were almost eliminated, such as the limitation of personal freedom recognized as inviolable by art. 13 of our Constitution (“Personal freedom is inviolable. No form of detention, inspection or personal search is permitted, nor any other restriction of personal freedom, except by reasoned act of the judicial authority and only in the cases and methods provided for by law”) to address the exceptional danger to public health.
Almost all Italians are confined to their homes; the production sector largely suspended or severely downsized; the economic and financial sectors severely penalized while waiting for the epidemiological storm to loosen its grip. Many laws reinterpreted, expressed differently, almost temporarily eliminated to deal with the extreme gravity of the situation.
Family doctors, like other healthcare professionals, had to fight on the front lines against the tsunami that hit the entire country in an unexpected way. It is right to remember that family doctors have physically faced the risk of contagion with their own bodies and with little or no protective equipment in order to protect the health of their patients. Some of them lost their lives, others came close to losing it. Now, 4 years later, we can see that, while many laws (some even of great constitutional rank) were relaxed or reinterpreted, law 425/96 continued to operate with the same indestructible effectiveness. Doctors were out on the border at patients’ homes or in their own clinics, while others busily continued the meticulous “combing” of prescriptions in the safety of their offices.
There has been much discussion in the last 3/4 years whether to remedy these anomalies precisely because of the extreme gravity of the pandemic situation, but the proposal remained pending for a long time.
Suddenly, doctors are receiving short-term payment warnings, recalling law 425/96 and art. 45 of the ACN to justify such requests.
As the FIMMG Provincial Section of Vercelli we find strident the call of many company managers to sacrifice their fellow General Practitioners who died in the fight against COVID-19 (some were over-prescribers and perhaps inappropriate) to soar, hypocritically, in an ethical leap into the world of medicine as an indifferent service to the human person.
Best regards.
Vercelli, 03/05/2024.
FIMMG Vercelli Provincial Section
