The regional law that allows retired general practitioners to temporarily return to work to address staff shortages is legitimate . This was established by the Constitutional Court with ruling no. 84, filed today, rejecting the appeal filed by the Government against regional law no. 12 of 2024.
This provision , which inserted paragraph 2-ter in Article 1 of the Sardinia Region Law number 5 of 2023, was challenged in the part in which it provided that, until 31 December 2024, retired general practitioners can join, even with freelance contracts, the primary care and continuity of care projects activated by the local health authorities, to ensure complete coverage of primary care in disadvantaged areas, and to have prescription pads. In challenging the aforementioned regional law, the Prime Minister argued that the Autonomous Region of Sardinia had exceeded its statutory powers and had violated state jurisdiction in matters of civil order. The contested provision, in fact, would conflict with the relevant state legislation and with Article 21, paragraph 1, letter j), of the 2024 National Collective Agreement, which establishes that a doctor who benefits from retirement benefits as regulated by current legislation is incompatible with carrying out the activities envisaged by the latter.
In rejecting the issue, the Court recognized that the contested provision, seeking to ensure primary care for citizens residing in disadvantaged areas and without a general practitioner, expresses an organizational purpose, in function of health protection, and is therefore a legitimate exercise of its own powers in this matter. While recognizing that collective bargaining and the binding nature of the ACN prescriptions are aimed at ensuring the necessary regulatory uniformity of the conventional employment relationship of general practitioners and therefore the homogeneous use of the essential levels of primary care throughout the national territory, the Court clarified that the Regions cannot be considered precluded from adopting extraordinary organizational measures with a limited temporal value, when such measures constitute a prompt response to the critical issues in the use of the essential levels of primary care in their territory.
Reasoning in the opposite direction, the Court observes, would mean preventing the Regions from adopting their own tools to address temporary critical situations in the provision of primary care, with the concrete risk of compromising the effectiveness of the fundamental right to health, depriving it of its essential core of minimum guarantees.
(Online Union)
