Fifty patients in an emergency department before anyone asked for the diploma: Italy's false doctors, from a 1984 forgery to a 2023 hospital contract

Italy is home to some of Europe's oldest medical schools and to a licensing system built on a state examination and a professional register. It also has a steady run of people who have practised for years with none of it.

According to Today.it, a 59-year-old woman from Turin, Enrica Massone, was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 15,000 euros after working as a doctor at the Saint Charles hospital in Bordighera, Liguria, between July and September 2023, hired through cooperatives that staff hospital departments. She covered shifts including in the emergency room and saw around fifty patients before colleagues grew suspicious. Every credential in her file, the court found, was counterfeit: the curriculum, the degree, a specialisation in internal medicine, the professional registration, and a claimed past as health director of a nursing home and as a prison doctor. The Massa Carrara police reported a separate case: a man, Giuseppe De Luca, aged 51, who had never obtained a degree and had practised medicine since 1984 on forged certificates. Frosinone Today reported another, a man working in a hospital emergency department without a degree, unmasked by the Carabinieri's health unit.

The pattern that links them is the staffing route. Italian hospitals fill gaps through cooperatives and agencies, and an agency's check of a doctor's papers is only as good as its access to the register. The Bordighera case showed that a full set of consistent forgeries could pass an agency and a hospital, and that the safeguard which finally worked was colleagues noticing that she did not know what a doctor knows.

For students, the case is a caution about what "recognised in Europe" means in practice. Recognition is a paper process, and paper can be forged; the people who caught Massone were doctors, not clerks. For anyone checking a practitioner in Italy, the Order of Physicians maintains a public register, searchable by name, and it is the only check that a set of forged documents cannot pass.