September 07, 2024 | 18.50
READING TIME: 4 minutes
The end of the summer has seen an escalation of attacks on healthcare workers from North to South. The latest episode of this ‘black’ August-September for doctors and nurses took place at the Riuniti Hospital in Foggia with healthcare workers locked inside a room to escape the anger of dozens of relatives and friends of a patient who died after an operation. “The episode at the Riuniti Hospital in Foggia – commented Antonio De Palma, national president of Nursing Up – has reached a new record: it left us shocked, and it wasn’t easy. We had never seen 50 people attacking doctors and nurses all at once, forced to barricade themselves in a room of a few square meters, even going so far as to injure one of them with kicks to the face, in the grip, let us say, of real fits of madness that have characterized most of these news stories. It is also very recent news that one of the professionals who was attacked is planning to resign”.
@nicolacostanzo1983 Foggia, 23-year-old dies after surgery: doctors and nurses attacked by 50 people #foggia #doctors #attacked #dead #girl ♬ original sound – NicolaCostanzo
In 2023 – according to Anaao-Assomed data – there were, in fact, 16,000 assaults, a third of which were physical and 70% of which were against women. According to the nurses’ union, Nursing Up, “kicks and punches seem to have even ended up at the bottom of the shameful ranking of types of violence. At the top of the list are even attempted strangulation, hair pulling, martial arts-style kicks to the face, while verbal death threats abound, in the name of pure terror, and even the appearance of a gun, fortunately a toy, as happened on August 23 at the Serd in Anzio, without forgetting the baseball bat that spread terror on August 16 at the emergency room of San Leonardo in Castellammare”.
Proposals to stop the violence
“The cup is full” is the gist of the appeals launched by many healthcare players, from the Medical Associations to the trade unions to the Federation of ASL and Hospitals, Fiaso. An outcry that has also brought several proposals, old and new, to stem the violence that targets those who save lives. The latest in chronological order is a bill by Senator Ignazio Zullo from FdI and provides for a sort of ‘daspo’, a temporary exclusion from free healthcare in the NHS for those who commit attacks on healthcare personnel or commit crimes against healthcare assets. The aim, as stated in the bill, is to “send a strong and clear message on the seriousness of certain violent demonstrations in the healthcare sector” and on the other to “constitute a deterrent factor”.
The nurses’ union Nursing Up instead calls for “the immediate presence of the army in hospitals and the urgent convocation of the Committee for Public Order and Security of the Ministry of the Interior”. The union also recalled that “in the month of August, which we have just left behind, we calculated 34 episodes of violence, physical and psychological, over 31 days”. The doctors’ unions said they were “ready to abandon the hospitals” if there were no “urgent measures” against the attacks and those who commit them. Anaao and Cimo are calling for “an extraordinary plan to reform the care and emergency system” and immediately “a meeting with the Minister of Health so that urgent measures can be shared that can act as a deterrent to these senseless raids”. Applying “the institute of deferred arrest in flagrante delicto also against those who commit acts of violence against healthcare personnel” is instead the suggestion of the president of Fnomceo, the National Federation of the Orders of Surgeons and Dentists, Filippo Anelli. But not only that “we ask that hospital facilities, healthcare facilities be video-monitored in such a way as to apply the penalties provided by law to aggressors”, Anelli highlighted.
The institute of deferred flagrancy “was originally introduced to combat violence during sports events. Its scope of application was then extended, leading to the drafting of the new article 382-bis of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which provides for it for some specific crimes of domestic violence and stalking that require arrest in flagrante delicto – Fnomceo recalled – According to this institute, anyone who, on the basis of video-photographic documentation from which the fact emerges unequivocally, is found to be the perpetrator is considered to be in a state of flagrancy, provided that the arrest is made no later than 48 hours after the fact”.
Fiaso instead aims for “determined action by the police and the judiciary with operational rules that allow for the immediate arrest of those responsible. Without concrete and timely deterrent measures, the situation cannot change and the risk is to get used to episodes of repeated violence in the corridors against those who, every day and amidst a thousand difficulties, ensure the right to health of citizens”.
