[Can we still envision a new role for Italian doctors?]

The medical profession simultaneously operates within three different backgrounds: the scientific, the ethical, and the economic one. Each is constantly changing, as well as their mutual relationship and interdependency. To maintain its central role in the society, the medical profession has to co-evolve with such an ever-changing context. This means being able to continuously (re)negotiate the status (social position), the role (professional model) and the function (healing from diseases, prolongation of life) of medical doctors for them to be beneficial to sick people. Sadly, the medical institutions (academia, medical trade union, scientific societies) do not appear to have realized such a need and are instead pledged to defend and perpetrate for the medical doctor the same status, role and function of the past. It is hard to find alternative interpretations to the decision of the medical council of Bologna to suspend some doctors, guilty of having prepared lifesaving protocols for extra-hospital emergency to be adopted by trained nurses. Such procedures, in their view, would have indeed illegitimately empowered nurses, so degrading the prestige of the medical profession.