The Italian healthcare system continues to feel the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic. However, the outlay of financial and organizational resources needed to confront the emergency must not take the focus off the structural issues posed by the need to protect a steadily ageing population’s health. Instead, the pandemic should offer an opportunity to highlight existing shortcomings and create new models with which to confront a future return to normality. This concerns the equilibrium between hospitals and local medicine, as well as between the system’s efficiency and its ability to ensure universal access to treatment.
The national healthcare system, created in 1978, has proven its importance over the decades, placing Italy among the countries with the highest life expectancy. Nevertheless, much remains to be done both in terms of lengthening healthy lives (focusing on crucial areas such as lifestyle and prevention) and in terms of level of services, whose regional disparity emerged clearly during the most critical moments of the pandemic. The remaining open issues regard the need for better national (and European level) coordination, as well as the importance of ensuring adequate financing for healthcare.
The vast organizational effort necessitated by the coronavirus brought out virtuous models of collaboration between the public sector – whose centrality has been reiterated over the months of crisis – and private actors, especially from the standpoint of capacity for innovation, which remains one of the drivers for improving the quality of treatment and of patients’ lives. Despite complications related to spending ceilings, the system of funding earmarked for developing innovative drugs seems to have produced significant results.
Collaboration between industry and healthcare must continue in other fields – from improved dialogue and planning to the introduction of new digital systems and technologies – in keeping with the model of the massive efforts undertaken in fighting the virus. This integrated public/private approach can also be applied to the role of insurance: supplemental company healthcare policies should go along with increased awareness of individual coverage. In fact, the private sector has the skills and resources to offer services that can complement universally guaranteed ones and work on prevention, thereby also putting resources needed for innovative treatments in circulation
The financial sustainability of the healthcare system remains critical. The pandemic has temporarily shifted the debate back to this topic, adding other important obstacles along the path to a balanced management of this strategic sphere.