The Italian hospital system

Maurizio Lozzi ()
Additional contact information
Maurizio Lozzi: Banca d'Italia

No 28, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Over the last decade two reforms have affected the Italian hospital system, one introducing market mechanisms, the other concerning the tools of planning and expense control assigned to the regional governments. The paper summarizes these institutional changes and describes the evolution of the structure and the activity of the hospital system, with a focus on the differences between regions. It highlights the following: (1) the reduction in the number of hospitals and hospital beds and the gap between regions in terms of hospital beds per capita; (2) the growth in personnel compared with the number of hospital beds; (3) the stationarity of admissions since the end of the nineties and the growth in the share of those in day hospital; (4) the greater number of admissions in southern regions, especially for inappropriate or less complex treatment, and the high level of migration towards northern hospitals; (5) with reference to costs, increasing returns to scale up to a given hospital size, which is larger, the more complex the courses of treatment provided; (6) the differences between regions in costs which are affected by the size of facilities and their type of specialization.

Keywords: hospitals; sanitary system; hospital performances; hospital costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2008-0028/QEF_28.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_28_08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().