uproar over the SIAN services, food hygiene services

Do physician-veterinarians necessarily have to head the SIAN services of the ASL/ULSS? This is the question the Ligurian Regional Administrative Court (TAR) sought to answer in ruling on the appeal filed by 5 physicians of the ASL 5 in La Spezia. Here is the full ruling. Essentially, what emerges from the ruling is the need for a comparative method on the part of the ASL/ULSS, which "must lead its managing bodies to establish a real comparison between the areas of activity that need to have either a surgeon or a veterinarian as their director. Therefore, that position cannot be granted \"a priori\" to a veterinarian". The basis of the appellants rests on a consideration of form rather than substance. Since the established practice within the healthcare system would be to recognize "by right" a preference for physician-veterinarians, with this very practice a serious error would be committed in evaluating the functions attributed to the role of the SIAN service, in fact reducing it to "prevention in matters of food safety". As Dr. Guberti stated to Quotidiano Sanità, the functions of the SIAN go well beyond the control of plant production, water, collective catering and the like. There are functions of nutritional surveillance and of preventive dietetics that are fundamental for the work of preventing chronic-degenerative diseases such as diabetes and many forms of tumors. And indeed the TAR seems to recognize all of this, although it stops one step short: it dwells on the need for a comparison of the functions and "areas of activity", in the absence of which "there arises a situation in which the justification of a choice made a priori, and thus unlawfully, is laid bare". ARTICLE SOURCE