Venice is not dead, but it needs doctors

‘Venice is beautiful, but I won’t live there’: misleading and offensive cliches have a variegated figure in a white coat, given the city’s lack of GPs because of the difficulty in finding available ones.

To try to remedy this, Ulss della Serenissima (that’s exactly what Ulss n. 3 Serenissima is called) has launched a “national and international” recruitment campaign, backed by the guarantee of certain benefits, such as a home (at least for the first time), an outpatient center and the possibility of access quickly to the maximum number of patients, 1,500, and thus the maximum salary, given the small number of fellows.

In fact, other factors also tend to reduce – in general, not only in Venice – the number of doctors available, such as incorrect planning of training, with maximum numbers restricting university admissions, and, at least in Veneto, with distortion. From the number of the general practitioner, who in recent years has been burdened with bureaucratic tasks in addition to encouraging him to “save” on services, specialized analyzes and in-depth examinations that must be prescribed and rewarded to the extent that he reduces them, and thus limits, if not distorts his role accurately (how can we Forget the mockery and revealing sarcasm of Northern League Minister Giorgetti: “But who still goes to the family doctor?”).

So, the topic is broader. Certainly, however, in some areas specific factors add up, as in Venice specifically.

“Doctor, doctor, the most beautiful city in the world awaits you”: this is the motto of the campaign, which aims to enhance the attractive aspects of the experience of living and working in Venice, and to overcome obstacles such as the difficulty of finding a home and workplace. The court, which is similarly understaffed, has already been trying in similar ways for some time, with uncertain results.

Perhaps the health and social care company (with the help of the municipality) could do better. A recent experience, from which the campaign draws its course, made it possible to lure a doctor who had previously worked in Como to the famous Castello area, which remained without pilots. So far he is arousing.

“Doctor, Doctor, the most beautiful city in the world awaits you”: this is the slogan of the campaign

Today in the island city where they work 45 general practitioner, generally with a high average life and, therefore, with the risk of creating other voids in the near future. It will be the first to be seen in Castello, San Marco and Judica, but by 2025 the problem will be widespread.

In fact, it is one aspect of the broader gun issue, that is, the loss of essential jobs, starting with the pitfalls that plague public health from policies of downsizing or closing services and creeping, and at times urgent, privatization, against resistance by a wide grassroots network, with active groups Very much like the Venetian public health movement.

This is certainly an aspect linked to the demographic crisis, even if today the city of waters, including the islands, has about 80,000 inhabitants (the same as the entire municipality of Treviso and more than twice the population of the city of Belluno), therefore, it is far from “dead” (think of it on This manner, as often happens, is a means of accompanying it faster to the end, abandoning it for lost, from a socio-demographic point of view, and favoring its predators, beginning with sharks.Excess tourism).

Therefore, defending existing basic services and ordering new ones, all those that are essential, is part of the difficult but inevitable effort to relaunch their social, economic and demographic quality.

The Ulss campaign benefits from the illustrations of Lucio Schiavon, an outstanding Venetian illustrator and graphic designer, awarded several times internationally (author of outstanding picture books, including the monsterNuages ​​publisher Barbara Monti texts, which tells the story of Gabriele Bortolozzo, the worker who reported the deaths from CVM to Marghera Petrochemical).

Even these beautiful pictures of the Ulis countryside, in these evenings suggestively projected on the façade of the Civic Hospital San Giovanni e Paolo, recreate a lively, colorful and uninhibited idea of ​​the city, not even in the face of the “monsters of the day” of privatization, public spending cuts and speculation.