Funds in maneuver for emergency rooms and for the oncological plan? Schillaci promises and doesn’t keep

The Ministry of Health does not keep the promises made to Parliament. In recent weeks, Minister Orazio Schillaci, speaking at a hearing before the Social Affairs and Health commissions of the Chamber and Senate, had undertaken to have the advance to 2023 of funding for emergency room workers totally absent from the text today under discussion in the Montecitorio hall.

In particular, the measure envisaged the advance, from 2024 to 1 January 2023, of the increase of 200 million in the first aid allowance already paid to medical management personnel and personnel in the health sector, employees of companies and bodies of the National Health Service operating in emergency services. For Schillaci this was supposed to represent a first signal in favor of those health personnel who complained about the total absence of measures addressed to them. “My commitment – explained the minister – will be aimed at anticipating the start of the measure in favor of emergency room health workers to 2023 and at working with the Regions so as to be able to allocate greater funding as soon as possible to better pay health workers and make the service in the NHS more attractive”. As we said, however, it happens that the announced amendment is in fact never filed with the Budget Committee and therefore does not form part of the text under discussion in the Chamber.

Added to this is a new sensational gaffe by the Undersecretary of Health Marcellus Gemmato. Answering yesterday in the Social Affairs Committee in the Chamber to a question on the shortage of personnel employed in emergency-urgency medicine, Gemmato explains: “Precisely for this purpose, as is known, a provision aimed at to recognise, due to the particular conditions of the work carried out by medical management personnel and personnel of the sector, operating in the Emergency Department, an increase in the specific indemnity, with an annual expenditure commitment of 200 million euros already starting from 2023”. The undersecretary therefore, eight hours after the conclusion of the work on the amendments to the maneuver in the Budget Committee announces in the Social Affairs Committee a government intervention that does not exist on the basis of an amendment which in fact was never tabled.

As if that weren’t enough, that funding to the National Oncology Plan also skips also announced to Parliament by Schillaci. In fact, the minister had undertaken to establish, in the estimates of the Ministry of Health, a fund called “Fund for the implementation of the National Oncological Plan 2022-2027 – Pon”, with an endowment equal to 10 million euros for each of the years 2023 and 2024aimed at strengthening strategies and actions for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and assistance of cancer patients. But even of this there is no trace in maneuver. Despite the oncological emergency reported by Schillaci himself, due to the lack of screening during the pandemic period, it was not possible to find even 10 million to invest in the new plan. Called into question for the launch of the first maneuver, we certainly cannot speak of a good debut for the new Ministry of Health.