In a recent fiery Assembly of the Medical Association, taking place in Milan, all the contradictions of the legislation in force with respect to admission to medical practitioners’ and odontologists’ professional Rolls emerged.

The opportunity arose following the call of the Ordinary Meeting, which was to approve an adjustment of the 2002 budget, as well as the final balance for 2001 of the Medical Practitioners’ and Odontologists’ Association. This is indeed a single Association which groups two separate Rolls and Committees (a Medical Practitioners’ Committee and an Odontologists’ Committee), which however become a single Committee when financial problems concerning the assets of the Medical Association need to be dealt with. Of course, in order to practice their profession, medical practitioners need to be put on the Medical Practitioners’ Roll, whereas Odontologists must be admitted to the Odontologists’ Roll. The legislator that had decreed the establishment of the Odontologists’ Roll, had also had to provide for protection for all the medical practitioners who had graduated prior to the establishment of the Dentistry University Course and who practised the odontological profession: in view of their double professional competence, these practitioners where entitled to admission to both Rolls, thus qualifying to practice both the medical and the odontological profession, which they had already been doing for decades even though they were only on the Medical Practitioners’ Roll.

Another professional figure requiring attention on this side was associated with the university students who had enrolled in the various courses of the Faculty of Medicine prior to the establishment of the new University Course and for whom a specially designed Law was issued, enabling them, upon graduation in Medicin, to be admitted to the new Odontologists’ Roll, since this had been established during the years in which they were already attending University. However, after a 10 year period (31 Oct. 1988 – 13 Oct. 1998), the then Ministry of Health, Mrs Bindi, issued a legislative decree which compelled the professionals who had graduated in Medicine over the period 1980/85, even though already on the Odontologists’ Roll under the previous Law and in fact already practising the profession of odontologist, to take a special aptitude test, which could nor be reset, if they wanted to continue to work as dentists. Of course this new legislation significantly upset all the odontologist medical practitioners who happened to be in this situation and who had already set up their dentistry practice years earlier; these professionals expressed all their vexation within the Association, which on one side had not specific competence on the subject, but on the other had not actually taken a definite stand to defend them in principle. In practice, the attendance of only 82 people at the Assembly of an Association which includes as many as 25,000 members (also in view of the fact that it had been called on the day on which the general strike was scheduled) allowed an exiguous but organised minority, taking advantage of proxies and of double registrations, not to approve the final balance of the Milan Association. Unfortunately, the institutive Standards of the Medical Association and the procedures on which the entire set of rules regulating election, Committee makeup, representativity at a national level and final balance approval, date back to the early post-war period and were never updated thereafter. Suffice it to say that, at a National Council level, the vote of an Association having 28,000 members has exactly the same value of an Association with 100 members, also in view of the fact that, at a local level, members who are on both professional Rolls but belong to the same Association are allowed to vote twice. Luckily, many Association Committees bravely tackle a whole range of problems concerning today’s medical activities, but if we were to keep to the Medical Association institutive Law, that in fact continues to be in force after decades although it was drafted when doctors had a different kind of professional competence, then the Association should restrict its functions to a mere Roll personal-data management. It is now decades that, with each Legislature, the politicians ‘on duty’ tackle the problem and produce ever-changing bills, which so far have always lapsed at the same time as the dissolution of Parliament.
All we can hope for is that this new wave of reformism, associated with a principle of alternate government that enables majority to actually govern the country for the five years scheduled, may make it possible to at last grant Professional Associations a modern organisation and a proper representation structure, with special reference to the Medical Association, maybe spitting it into two Associations, patterning themselves on all other Healthcare Professional Associations.

Translated by Interpres sas