Bureaucracy limits access to care healthcare, especially in Lombardy. This is the analysis that emerges from the data collected in 2023 by Emergency in its mobile and fixed clinics in Italy. “Bureaucratic obstacles and administrative difficulties in obtaining the entry requirements to treatment, poor recognition of the person’s rights, difficulty in navigating a complex healthcare system. These are the barriers that today in Italy prevent the right to health of foreign and Italian citizens”, say the Emergency operators who work in clinics throughout Italy.
From Ponticelli to Marghera. From Castel Volturno to Milan. More than nine thousand people turned to this service during 2023. Patients arriving from Italy (12%), Nigeria (10.2%), Morocco (8.8%), Tunisia (7.9%), Bangladesh (6 .7%), Romania (6.4%), Peru (4.9%), Senegal (4.62%), Ghana (3.4%) and Ukraine (3.3%). Most of them are men (64%) while women represent 36%. In total they are 42 thousand the free services that have been provided. Not just healthcare and nursing care, actually. Over 19 thousand services concern healthcare mediation activities.
In 2023 the clinics focused on helping to overcome difficulties in accessing the treatment path, requesting the health card and requesting the code STP (Foreigner Temporarily Present), i.e. the tool that allows access to healthcare facilities for “irregular” foreign citizens. “This data should make us reflect – he explains Sauro Forni, coordinator of Programma Italia nurses – means that there are still many administrative and bureaucratic difficulties in the territories that make it difficult to directly access healthcare facilities. Bureaucracy often represents an obstacle to the possibility of treatment.”
A difficulty which, according to Emergency operators, becomes even greater in regions such as Lombardy. The reason? “Despite the provisions of national legislation regarding the right to urgent and essential care for non-regular European and non-EU citizens – reports the coordinator of the Milan clinic Loredana Carpentieri – the Lombardy Region does not yet guarantee this right to European citizens whose only possibility of treatment, within the NHS, is represented by access to Emergency room for whose services provided payment is often requested”.
Photo by Alessandro Annunziata – Emergency
