Assisted fertilization paid for with the ticket from 36 euros instead of 700 euros per service, as required by a hospital directive, it is a story that has been ongoing in Padua for 17 years and which involved two university professors: Antonio Ambrosini and the son Guido, both gynecologists and former head doctors. After investigations criminal cases (closed due to acquittals and prescriptions) and after the accounting ones (closed with a significant loss to the treasury paid by the two doctors) now comes the final word also for the administrative question: the Cassation has rejected Guido Ambrosini’s appeal against the dismissal from his role as Head of the Human Reproductive Physiopathology unit of the Padua hospital clinic.
Doctor Ambrosini, the Court of Cassation says that the hospital is right, how did it not know that those services were paid for?
«I repeat again, and I always will: I didn’t know. We have known since 2003 that the Region had made the decision to apply a cost to those procedures, but I never received a directive on what should be written in the prescriptions we gave to the patients, in all those years there was never a meeting, never a meeting to discuss the budget.”
The judges believe the hospital…
«At this point the game is over for me, but apart from the fact that I didn’t know about the hospital directive, it must also be said that that type of procedure in all hospitals in Italy was paid for with a ticket, I simply behaved as they did all my other colleagues in the rest of the country, with this I don’t mean to say that the Veneto Region had taken an illegitimate decision at the time, healthcare autonomy allowed it, I’m just saying that many other hospitals provided this service with the ticket and I don’t I found nothing strange about it.”
So you didn’t apply the lower figure for moral reasons?
«I’m not Robin Hood if that’s what you’re asking me, but I didn’t even get anything in return, I didn’t get any advantage from having applied the ticket compared to the cost of the service, and I assure you that the Finance Department also came to do all the investigations, I didn’t collect an extra euro. However, in the end, we still achieved a result.”
Which?
«Now medically assisted procreation is included in the Lea, that is, in the essential levels of assistance, it means that now access to IVF and ICSI can be had by paying a simple ticket, I don’t want to justify myself with this, after all I paid the Court of Auditors and a very high bill for lawyers, but we have finally arrived at the starting point: helping women to have children must be a low-cost service.”
Are you still dealing with IVF and Icsi now?
«Yes, I created a private practice and an excellent team of gynecologists work with me, and if in Padua we were at the forefront of assisted fertilization, now we are looking for a new record, that of social freezing, i.e. the freezing of the eggs of women who decide to preserve their fertility for when they are ready.”
Does the hospital not offer this service?
“The hospital only does this for cancer patients who can freeze their eggs before chemotherapy compromises their fertility.”
And what are you aiming for?
“It would be nice if social freezing were also a free service of the national system, politics should deal with the birth rate, and this is the most concrete way to do it.”
