Speaking to the press during an event held at the University of Pisa for the inauguration of the academic year, Schillaci said it is alarming ‘the number of contracts that have not been signed or that have been abandoned, especially in the area of emergency medicine’.

The minister described this phenomenon as ‘a real drain of young doctors’ and announced an investment plan aimed at creating the conditions for them to see the National Health System as attractive again, so that working in public health is rewarding from both an economic and professional point of view’.

There is a strong commitment with the universities to offer aspiring doctors a future of growth and excellence in Italy’, added the Health Minister and, in this sense, ‘we are addressing the issue of scholarships for specialization schools’.

Last February 15, Schillaci made known that ‘between 2005 and 2015 more than 10 thousand doctors left Italy to work in foreign countries’, a problem that continues.

It is ‘an exodus of human capital that we cannot afford’, he expressed to the minister, adding that, on the other hand, it contributes to the current shortage ‘a short-sighted programming of the number of entries to the Faculty of Medicine, which does not respond to the real needs of the country’.

He also indicated that ‘it is a priority to act in order to stop what we can define as a real disappearance of some medical specialties’, a phenomenon that he said ‘is taking on worrying dimensions, especially in the area of emergency medicine’.

ef/jav/mem/ort.