doctors and medical care in rome

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For emergency first aid...

in Rome or anywhere in Italy, you must go to a Pronto Soccorso, which is a 24 hour first aid centre manned by a skeleton staff of doctors that can handle most things less than amputations or germ warfare fallout. Find your nearest in your local phone directory. Anything more serious and you'll have to call a hospital and hope for the best. The ambulance will probably turn up some time next Wednesday, so you're probably best off driving yourself there.

You are of course strongly recommended to take out holiday insurance before you travel to Italy, which should include provision for covering the cost of medical care. Even the cost of, say, an antibiotic medicine to clear up an infection or bug you may pick up over here in Italy could put a big dent in your holiday budget. You should be able to reclaim this from your insurance policy when you return home (check your policy) but count on having extra funds with you whilst in Italy to cover such eventualities. Prescribed medicines issued to foreigners outside of the healthcare system here can cost between 12,000 and 70,000 Lire for a single issue, so bear this in mind when budgeting.

If you're gonna be staying or living in Italy long termish, then obviously you need to get registered into the national healthcare system as soon as possible, and we present some rough guidelines on how to handle this below. For more specific information on this, email us directly.

Obviously you can pay for private healthcare and most of what we say here will be academic, but for those visitors who just need 'a quick shot doc', we here discuss some of the facts which make a shot from an Italian doctor anything but quick!

Actually, there's nothing wrong with Italian doctors - Doctors and specialists here are among the finest in the world - diligent, caring, and progressive. But they are severely hampered by a disgustingly inefficient and underfunded healthcare administration. As usual, the culprit is Italian bureaucracy, which prides itself on putting as much paperwork between you and the doctor as possible.
You cannot just turn up at a GP's surgery and see a doctor.
As a non-national, you must first have all your resident's papers in order, before you can go to the regional healthcare offices and apply to be registered with a doctor. You must already know who you want as a doctor, which means you must first have already spoken to a doctor and asked him if you can register with him, but of course he is not actually allowed to treat you until you've registered with him at your regional offices. Eventually they'll issue you with a little certificate which you have to produce every time you visit your doctor, so that he can copy the numbers of it onto any prescriptions you might want. As most GPs do not have a permanent surgery to call their own, none have a computer with a central database of patients that they can merge with a similar database of prescription drugs. Instead, everything's written by hand and has to be double checked by all concerned.

As a non-national, this certificate will only be valid for your first year. After that you must apply again, and this second, new certificate will be valid for either one more year, or until the expiry of your permesso di soggiorno, if your permesso di soggiorno is for longer than a year. When the permesso di soggiorno expires you must reapply for a new permesso di soggiorno and also a new healthcare certificate to accompany it. Even if you are an EEC citizen, at no time will the Italian authorities admit you wholly into their system as a regular - Your rights to healthcare are regarded as only a privilege and are subject to this periodic review and renewal.

Forget the group practices of GPs in England - There is no such thing as a health centre here - GPs meet their patients on a circuit basis, in rented rooms only at certain times in the week. Often the doctor is late and everyone queues in the street, come rain or shine, waiting for him to arrive. Forget starchy-smiled receptionists handing out numbered cards that state when it's your turn to go in - Instead, as each patient arrives, they say to those already waiting - "Who's the last". Quite a contrast to tight-lipped Brits who won't even look at each other in a waiting room.