Seeing a doctor in Italy: who to call, and when

Between 8:00 pm and 8:00 am, and all day Saturday and Sunday, the service that sees you in Italy is the guardia medica, it operates nationwide and it is free.

The out of hours service almost nobody tells you about

The guardia medica, also called continuita' assistenziale, covers 8:00 pm to 8:00 am (20:00 to 08:00) every day plus Saturdays and Sundays, across the whole country, at no cost. It is a doctor on duty for the ordinary problems that happen at the wrong hour, and it is not the emergency room.

Its phone number is local, not national, so ask the ASL, your host or the nearest pharmacy for the number that covers the address you are sleeping at. The ministry page carrying these rules records a last update of March 21, 2013, which is old for a service description and is the reason to confirm the number locally rather than the arrangement itself.

Monday to Friday, in daylight, you have a doctor too

A European traveler holding the health insurance card can be seen free and with no ticket by a family doctor or a contracted pediatrician on weekdays. The entitlement covers care that becomes medically necessary during a temporary stay, which is wider than emergency care, and the card is the only document required.

It applies to people insured in an EU state, in Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway, and in Switzerland since June 1, 2002, and it works at public facilities and at private ones contracted to the health service. The Brexit position of cards issued in the United Kingdom is not verified in our fact set and is therefore not stated here.

The emergency room is the expensive door

3 things carry a ticket: emergency room care triaged to a non-urgent priority code, specialist visits, and diagnostics prescribed by a doctor. Hospital admission itself is exempt, though a private room is charged for. Class A medicines are free apart from a regional charge; class C medicines are paid in full.

Amounts are set region by region and not nationally, which is why no figure appears here: what you pay in Lombardy is not what you pay in Sicily. The practical consequence is that arriving at the emergency room with a problem the guardia medica could handle costs you both money and hours.

The summer service that is not free

1 branch of this system charges: the guardia medica turistica, set up in summer in regions with heavy tourist flows. It charges a fee, set by each region, and it is the one branch of this system that is not free at the point of use.

That fee is reimbursable by your own insurer with form E126¹. Keep the receipt, because it is the same paperwork trail as the fallback below.

If you paid, you can still claim

2 documents make the claim, the payment receipts and the medical paperwork, and a European insured traveler who did not use the card can recover the cost from their own insurer on return. The calculation is made on the tariffs of the country of temporary stay, not on the invoice you were handed, so the two figures may not match.

You need the payment receipts and the medical documentation, kept together and legible. For spa treatment the instrument is not the card at all but form E112³, also called S2, and it has to be arranged before you travel rather than after. The emergency numbers page covers the call itself, which is a different decision from all of these.

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