The reform of the medical profession in Italy

This work aims at retracing the reform of the medical profession in Italy during the latest two decades, highlighting the factors which made it possible, and studying the role played by doctors, in order to detect whether they have been able to affect the health care policy-making. The focus goes on hospital doctors, and dwell particularly on the latest structural Italian health care reform, well known as Mrs. Bindi reform. Such law is indeed interesting for two reasons. First, it represents a watershed with regard to public hospital doctors' private practice regulations. Second, the sharpness provided by that norm seems to be quite peculiar in the European landscape. The focus on hospital doctors is due to the centrality of hospitals in the Italian health care system. Besides, the hospital sector seems to be usually a little underexplored by the academic literature, above all compared to the realm of primary care. The present work elaborates an explanatory framework in order to analyze the key elements involved in the policy-making, and employs it to study the medical profession through the main Italian structural health care reforms.