For several months my family has been facing a very difficult ordeal, linked to the illness of one of us, which requires highly specialized care.
As a public affairs professional in the health sector, a thought comes naturally to me: how lucky are we in Italy to have a public healthcare system?
Without going into the personal side, I would like to make tangible what our healthcare system is able to guarantee:
- A medically staffed ambulance.
- A helicopter transfer.
- Access to the emergency department, with tests such as a CT scan.
- An emergency surgical procedure, on a Saturday night, with everything that entails: surgeons, anesthetists, nurses, operating room.
- A month in intensive care, with 24/7 monitoring, advanced technologies, life-saving drugs and highly specialized staff. Among these, opioids, often at the center of debate, but essential to relieve the most acute pain.
- Continuous support, made also of human presence: professionals able not only to treat, but to explain, accompany and respond, even to the simplest questions from those who, like me, do not have clinical training.
- A highly specialized ward that continues the care, with further procedures, medical devices and diagnostic technologies.
And then there is rehabilitation, made up of physiotherapy, speech therapy, psychological support and much more. That part of the journey that too often remains invisible, but is essential.
Because the goal is not only to save a life, but to ensure the best possible quality of life. For dignity. For fairness. To allow every person to be part of society.
As a caregiver, the question becomes inevitable: how much would all this cost, if it were not guaranteed? If every step depended on the ability to pay for it?
It is in moments like these that the value of the public healthcare system stops being theoretical and becomes deeply concrete. And that is precisely the point: our healthcare systems are not simply services, but an essential part of Europe’s social infrastructure.
Almost twenty years ago, in 2006, European leaders had recognized this clearly, setting out in the Council Conclusions on common values and principles in European Union health systems a precise commitment: universality, equity, access to care based on need, solidarity.
Today the question is inevitable and also uncomfortable: are those values still a real priority, or are they gradually becoming only a formal reference?
Because invoking them in documents is relatively easy. Guaranteeing them every day, within systems under pressure, is much less so.
The risk is real. A gradual weakening of the National Health Service, and more broadly of European systems, linked to increasingly evident factors: insufficient public investment, shortages of healthcare staff, infrastructure struggling to keep pace with innovation, and growing pressure from a private offer that is ever more competitive.
The result is a balance that slowly shifts. Systems that continue to define themselves as universal, but that risk, over time, becoming less fair, less accessible, less able to maintain what they promise.
And so the issue is not only recognizing these values. It is asking ourselves whether we are still willing to truly support them. Because without a strong public system, what we consider a right today risks slowly becoming a privilege.
Protecting and strengthening the public healthcare system is not an ideological stance. It is a choice of fairness, sustainability and, ultimately, what kind of society we want to be.
I apologize for this long post. But I felt the need, and perhaps also the duty, to share this reflection, as a caregiver, from a hospital room. The rest—what it means to be a caregiver—is another story.
Camilla Randazzo, Weber Shandwick
