Three years and a 15,000 euro fine: the Turin woman with a middle-school diploma who treated 160 patients at Bordighera's Saint Charles hospital

In Italy a doctor must hold a laurea in medicina, pass the state licensing exam and be entered on the register of the provincial Ordine dei medici, which is searchable online through the national federation FNOMCeO. Hospitals short of staff increasingly fill shifts through outside staffing companies and cooperatives, and a case decided by the Tribunale di Imperia shows what happens when those intermediaries accept a candidate's own declarations instead of checking the register.

According to Riviera Time, reporting on 25 June 2026, the Tribunale di Imperia sentenced Enrica Massone at first instance to three years in prison, a 15,000 euro fine and court costs for ideological falsity, unlawful practice of the medical profession and fraud, after she worked as a doctor at the Saint Charles hospital in Bordighera, in the province of Imperia, without a degree or licence. Investigators established that she held only a licenza media, the lower-secondary school certificate. The prosecutor had asked for three years and four months; the defence had sought acquittal, citing a psychiatric report and gaps in the facilities' own controls. Damages to the ASL, the Ordine dei medici of Milan and the staffing company Cura Medica SPP are to be set in civil proceedings, and she was already detained in Turin under a separate final conviction.

According to 9colonne, Massone, 59, from Turin, had never attended university. She answered an advertisement on the Indeed platform posing as an internal medicine specialist, deceived a medical staffing company, used falsified emails to create recommendations and obtained the registration number of a real doctor. She examined 160 patients in the Bordighera emergency room, signed as many documents and collected more than 10,000 euros; 9colonne put the sums due to the civil parties, including ASL 1 Imperia and the Milan Ordine, at nearly 30,000 euros. She was already serving four years and three months for taking an elderly couple's pension after being appointed their court support administrator. Corriere Torino and La Stampa carried further reports on 28 October 2026: Corriere Torino reported that she had seen more than 160 patients and had taken charge of a man struck by a heart attack, and La Stampa reported that she treated a heart-attack case and had said she thought the job would be like working in a care home.

The mechanism was a self-certification. Open, citing La Stampa on 19 October 2023, reported that she applied as a gettonista, a per-shift contractor, through the Igea cooperative, which supplied staff to the company running the hospital's first-aid point, with a self-declaration referring to a degree from Milan-Bicocca; no registration with any Ordine could be found. She worked three shifts in early September 2023 before the director of clinical governance reported the matter to the leadership of ASL 1 Imperia and a complaint reached prosecutors. Nobody matched her name against the register before she was put in front of patients.

For students and families, the lesson is that a register exists precisely so that nobody has to take a doctor's word for it. In Italy, search the FNOMCeO register before accepting treatment or a job placement arranged through an agency, and treat any professional whose only proof is a declaration or a borrowed registration number as unverified.