Italian army will guard a hospital after attacks on medical workers

ROME (AP) — Italy’s army will guard medical staff at a hospital in the southern Calabria region starting Monday, after a string of violent attacks on doctors and nurses by enraged patients and relatives across Italy, local media reported.

Prefect Paolo Giovanni Grieco approved a plan to reinforce the surveillance services already operated by soldiers on sensitive targets in the Calabrian town of Vibo Valentia, including the hospital, the reports said.

Recent attacks on health care workers have been particularly frequent in southern Italy, prompting the doctors’ national guild to request that the army be deployed to ensure medical staff safety.

The turning point was an assault at the Policlinico hospital in the southern city of Foggia in early September. A group of about 50 relatives and friends of a 23-year-old woman — who died during emergency surgery — turned their grief and rage into violence, attacking the hospital staff.

Video footage, widely circulated on social media, showed doctors and nurses barricading in a room to escape the attack. Some of them were punched and injured. The director of the hospital threatened to close its emergency room after denouncing three similar attacks in less than a week.

With over 16,000 reported cases of physical and verbal assaults nationwide in 2023 alone, Italian doctors and nurses have called for drastic measures.

“We have never seen such levels of aggression in the past decade,” said Antonio De Palma, president of the Nursing Up union, stressing the urgent need for action.

“We are now at a point where considering military protection in hospitals is no longer a far-fetched idea. We cannot wait any longer,” he said.

The Italian Federation of Medical-Scientific Societies has also proposed more severe measures for offenders, such as suspending access to free medical care for three years for anyone who assaults healthcare workers or damages hospital facilities.

Understaffing and long waiting lists are the main reasons behind patients’ frustration with health workers.

According to Italy’s largest union for doctors, nearly half of emergency medicine positions remained unfilled as of 2022. Doctors lament that Italy’s legislation has kept wages low, leading to overworked and burned out staff at hospitals.

These problems have been further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed many health workers to leave Italy in search of better opportunities abroad.

In 2023, Italy was short of about 30,000 doctors, and between 2010 and 2020, the country saw the closure of 111 hospitals and 113 emergency rooms, data from a specialized forum showed.

Giada Zampano, The Associated Press