Increase safety in the workplace. This is what the Italian Society of Psychiatry continues to ask for which, to remember Barbara Capovani killed a year ago by a patient outside the hospital where she worked, will wear mourning on her arm at work on Saturday.
Despite the torchlight processions with thousands of psychiatrists and health workers in the most important squares in Italy, letters, interviews and appeals to the institutions and the President of the Republic "to date - reports Sip - no concrete response has been obtained". "For a topic - he underlines - that extends to the entire medical field: according to Inail, every year there are over 2 thousand cases of violence in healthcare. Six thousand in the three-year period 2020-2022, with an increase of 14% over the previous three years". Of all these, according to Anaao-Assomed data, 34% take place in a psychiatric setting with 21% in the emergency room.
Among the open problems is the abolition of the Lamorgese Circular on the prohibition of intervention by the police in emergency rooms and departments. A decision which, according to Emi Bondi, president of SIP "disappointed doctors and made the management of violent patients in psychiatry departments further difficult". "Certainly a law full of good intentions but applied poorly and poorly" adds the national secretary Guido Di Sciascio.
"The psychiatry of these '20s' of the new millennium - concludes the elected president Liliana Dell'Osso - has nothing to do with that of the seventies of the last century.
Society has changed, psychic pathologies have grown in number, since they are diagnosed more precisely and earlier. Treatments have been revolutionized, yet resources have remained stagnant, at least with respect to the mental health needs of this new society".