There are around 200 specialists operating in the Romagna hospital structures connected to the University of Bologna and they are destined to increase. On the Forlì front, in four years the Faculty of Medicine has gone from 95 annual students to 130 and in two years the first graduates from the Forlì campus will leave. «Having Medicine courses and specialization courses means suffering much less from the lack of doctors – says Franco Stella, president of the Medicine course -. We went from 95 to 130 enrolments, this means that in six years we will have almost seven hundred medical students. We have some very good students in Romagna who come from a high ranking and who will become very good doctors.”
The opportunities offered by the Romagna training network and the University of Bologna are also a resource for the local healthcare system. «In particular, in Forlì there are already two specialization schools – explains Stella – which are Thoracic Surgery, which is the first Unibo specialization school based in Romagna, aggregated to the Forlì department. Subsequently, the specialization in Palliative Care was opened, managed by Marco Maltoni, director is Professor Paolo Muratori. Many Unibo specialists also come to Forlì whose school is in Bologna but where in this case they use the Romagna training network. This is because currently the places that the Ministry gives to specialization schools are also somehow linked to the size of the training network. In Forlì, for example, in the general surgery department directed by professor Ecolani of oncology, many residents come from Bologna. There are around 200 specialists in the area and it’s just the beginning, over the years they will increase.”
Universities and structures within the Romagna healthcare system are sought after by those who aim to be a doctor, even if the place of specialization cannot be chosen by the resident. «The concept is that we now have a national competition also for specialization so the choice takes place with respect to the national ranking – continues Franco Stella – we in Romagna have specialists who entered the Medicine competition with a very high ranking and therefore I imagine that also in the choice of specialization a situation of this type arises again. Romagna will always be attractive for specialists because there is the possibility of seeing everything and there are gigantic performance numbers, the quality of healthcare is very good and there is an important technological background.”
On the question of eliminating the limited number at university for access to Medicine courses, Stella is categorical: «The limited number cannot be removed in the sense that suddenly it is not absorbable to place 70 thousand people who want to be doctors, we risk creating a host of unemployed. The national healthcare system is not always attractive for new doctors, because abroad and in private healthcare the conditions are better. The real issue is to train good doctors and be able to retain them, it would be sufficient to avoid the bleeding of doctors from the healthcare system. Something must change, we need a more meritocratic system and also an economic adjustment compared to Europe.”
