Call for army to protect Italian hospital staff after series of attacks

Unions of doctors and nurses in Italy have called on authorities to consider deploying the military to hospitals in response to a rise in attacks by patients and their relatives, which has sparked outrage across the country.

In one of the latest, captured on video and widely shared on social media, doctors and nurses say were forced to barricade themselves in a room at the Policlinico hospital in Foggia, in the southern region of Puglia, on Friday after about 50 relatives and friends of a 23-year-old woman died after emergency surgery targeted medical staff. Some health care workers were injured, with bloodstains visible on the floor of the emergency room.

Two days later the same hospital reported another attackwith a patient who kicked and punched three emergency room nurses. Then on Tuesday, also in Puglia, a doctor was attacked by a patient at the Francesco Ferrari Hospital in Casarano, near Lecce.

Two other physical attacks were reported this week in the province of Naples, where health workers said patients and their families turned on emergency room doctors after being asked to wait their turn. In Palermo in August, a relative of a patient a volunteer beaten at the Termini Hospital of Imerese.

Antonio De Palma, national president of the Nursing Up union, said he was shocked by the increase in violence. “In the last 10 years, such an escalation of brutality has never been documented,” he said. “We have never reached such a level of danger and aggressiveness. We urgently call on the Minister of the Interior to address the seriousness of this situation. It has become necessary to consider deploying the army in healthcare facilities. We cannot wait any longer.”

The National Federation of Nursing Professions Orders (Fnopi) condemned the “criminal actions” against healthcare workers as “intolerable” and called for protection by authorities to ensure a safe working environment.

Loreto Gesualdo, president of the Italian Federation of Medical-Scientific Societies (Fism), has introduced a bill to suspend free access to medical care for three years for those who attack health workers or damage health facilities.

Fish reported more than 16,000 verbal and physical attacks on doctors and nurses in Italian hospitals in 2023 alone.

Last year, a 62-year-old man was sentenced to 16 years in prison for murder of a doctor in 2022 with an axe outside the Policlinico San Donato hospital in Milan, because he believed the treatments he had prescribed had been useless.

The director of the Policlinico hospital in Foggia, Giuseppe Pasqualone, told the Guardian that the facility was now on the verge of closure. “If we continue on this path, there is a real risk that we will have to close the emergency department because of the dwindling number of doctors, nurses and health workers,” he said.

“If the emergency department were to close, other departments could also close. We ask patients and their families to be patient and to remember that our doctors and nurses are under immense stress, caused by the widespread shortage of medical staff in our hospital, as in many other Italian hospitals. If we add to this the fear among our healthcare workers, we risk losing even more healthcare workers willing to work in our institution.”

Many of the attacks are caused by hospital staff shortages and family members’ frustration over long waiting times for operations and consultations.

According to the medical union ANAAOBy 2022, nearly half of emergency room positions were vacant. Salary cap laws over the past two decades to curb government spending have kept salaries low and work schedules punitive. For many Italian medical staff, the Covid pandemic was the tipping point, accelerating an exodus abroad. Spending plans published by Giorgia Meloni’s government include further cuts to health care.

According to the Forum delle Società Scientifiche dei Clinici Ospedalieri e Universitari Italiani, there was a shortage of about 30,000 doctors in Italy. Between 2010 and 2020, 111 hospitals and 113 emergency departments were closed.