{"slug":"healthcare-by-region-italy","title":"How Good Is Healthcare Where You Want to Live in Italy?","deck":"Italy has a national health service. But the care you experience can look very different depending on the region you choose.","author":"Caitlin","published":"2026-09-30","updated":"2026-09-30","status":"published","topics":["healthcare","places"],"url":"https://www.expatliving.it/articles/healthcare-by-region-italy?utm_source=ai-api&utm_medium=referral","markdownUrl":"https://www.expatliving.it/articles/healthcare-by-region-italy.md?utm_source=ai-api&utm_medium=referral","places":[],"datasets":[{"title":"Healthcare quality: prevention, by region","url":"https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-prevention-region?utm_source=ai-api&utm_medium=referral","slug":"healthcare-quality-prevention-region-2024","vintage":"2024","coverage":"Region — 19 of 20 (Trentino-Alto Adige's two autonomous provinces score separately)"},{"title":"Province-level comparison from BES data","url":"https://www.expatliving.it/data/bes?utm_source=ai-api&utm_medium=referral","coverage":"Comune (~7,900) / province"}],"body":"When people think about retiring in Italy, healthcare is often treated as a national question: does Italy have good healthcare? For a move that may last ten or twenty years, that question is too broad to be very useful.\n\nWhat matters more is what care looks like in the region — and eventually the province and town — where you may actually live.\n\nItaly has the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale, or SSN. Residents who are enrolled can access public healthcare, and the system is built around national standards. But the services themselves are largely organized and delivered by the regions.\n\nThat means the healthcare experience can vary depending on where you live. The official data makes those differences visible.\n\n## Why can healthcare feel different from one part of Italy to another?\n\nItaly sets national Livelli Essenziali di Assistenza — the essential levels of care the public system is meant to provide. The regions are responsible for organizing the services that deliver them.\n\nThe [Ministry of Health](https://www.salute.gov.it/new/it/news-e-media/notizie/livelli-essenziali-di-assistenza-sintesi-dei-risultati-del-nuovo-sistema-di/?tema=Livelli+essenziali+di+assistenza) monitors regional performance through the Nuovo Sistema di Garanzia, or NSG. It scores three broad areas from 0 to 100, with 60 used as the official sufficiency threshold.\n\nThe three areas measure different parts of the system:\n\nPrevention: vaccination, screening, public-health programs and other services intended to prevent illness or detect it earlier.\n\nDistrict or community care: the care you use outside a hospital, including local health services, outpatient care and chronic-disease management.\n\nHospital care: how the hospital system performs.\n\nWe have now put all three measures into separate maps on Expat Living Italy: [healthcare prevention by region](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-prevention-region), [district and community care by region](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-district-region), and [hospital care by region](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-hospital-region).\n\nLooking at the three together matters because a region can perform very differently depending on which part of healthcare you are measuring.\n\n## Why is hospital care only part of the picture?\n\nAbruzzo is a good example. In the Ministry’s 2023 NSG results, Abruzzo scored 83 for hospital care, comfortably above the sufficiency threshold. But it scored 54 for prevention and 45 for district care.\n\nSicily shows a similar pattern: 80 for hospital care, but 49 for prevention and 44 for district care.\n\nFor someone deciding where to retire, that distinction matters. Most of your contact with healthcare will not happen in a hospital. As you get older, routine appointments, diagnostics, chronic-disease management, follow-up care and prevention can become just as important.\n\nSo when someone says a region has “good healthcare,” it is worth asking what part of the system they mean.\n\n## Which regions perform well across all three areas?\n\nSome regions perform strongly across prevention, community care and hospitals.\n\nTuscany scored 95 for prevention, 95 for district care and 96 for hospital care. Veneto scored 98, 96 and 94. Emilia-Romagna scored 97, 89 and 92.\n\nThe Ministry reported that 13 regions or autonomous provinces were above the 60-point threshold in all three areas in the 2023 assessment. Others fell below it in one or two areas.\n\nThat does not mean you should automatically choose Tuscany, Veneto or Emilia-Romagna. A regional score cannot tell you how long you will wait for a specific appointment, how close the nearest specialist is or what your experience will be with an individual hospital.\n\nBut it is a useful first signal when you are comparing places.\n\n## Why do healthcare scores and health outcomes tell you different things?\n\nThe Ministry’s NSG data measures how regional health systems perform against the essential levels of care. ISTAT’s BES data tells us something different: what health and well-being look like in the population.\n\nOur [BES explorer](https://www.expatliving.it/data/bes) lets you compare all 107 Italian provinces across health and ten other domains. The health indicators include measures such as life expectancy and avoidable mortality, alongside other outcomes.\n\nThis gives you two useful views. You can look at how the regional healthcare system performs, then look at the health picture in the province where you are considering living.\n\nNeither is a complete answer on its own, but together they give you a more useful starting point.\n\n## What should you check before choosing a town?\n\nIf healthcare is an important part of your move, I would add four questions to the usual property and lifestyle checklist.\n\n1. How does the region perform on prevention, district care and hospital care?\n\n2. What do the province-level BES health indicators look like?\n\n3. How far is the town from the services you are likely to use regularly, not just the nearest hospital?\n\n4. How does that healthcare picture balance against the other things that matter to you, such as housing cost, community, transportation, climate and access to family?\n\nThat last question matters because the region with the strongest healthcare scores may not be the place that works best for your life.\n\nA town with excellent regional healthcare but housing you cannot afford will not solve the problem. A very cheap house that leaves you dependent on a long drive for routine care may not either.\n\nYou can compare official property prices in our [OMI housing data](https://www.expatliving.it/data/omi), explore broader quality-of-life indicators in BES, and then open individual comune profiles as you narrow the shortlist.\n\n## How should you use the healthcare maps when comparing places?\n\nI would use them as a screening tool rather than as a ranking.\n\nA healthy retiree may care most about prevention and easy access to a primary care doctor. Someone managing a chronic condition may put more weight on district care. Someone who already knows they will need specialist treatment may look much more closely at hospitals and referral centers.\n\nThose are different needs, even though all three people may begin with the same question: where in Italy has good healthcare?\n\nThe useful answer depends on the kind of care you expect to need and how much access matters in your day-to-day life.\n\n## What can the data not tell you yet?\n\nThere are important limits to this first version of the healthcare picture.\n\nThe regional NSG scores do not tell us whether a doctor speaks English. They do not tell us the waiting time for the specialist you personally need. And they do not yet give us a clean, comparable town-by-town measure of how long it takes to reach a hospital, primary care doctor or pharmacy.\n\nThose are exactly the gaps we want to work on next.\n\nFor now, if you have narrowed your move to two or three areas, the healthcare maps can help you see where you should ask more detailed questions before you sign a lease or buy a house.\n\n## Where should you start if healthcare matters to your move?\n\nStart with the three healthcare layers: prevention, district and community care, and hospital care.\n\nThen use the BES explorer to look at health outcomes and quality of services at the province level, and our comune profiles to bring the decision back down to the place you may actually call home.\n\nThe question is not simply whether Italy has good healthcare.\n\nIt is whether the healthcare around the place you want to live will still work for you five, ten or twenty years from now.","attribution":{"required":true,"license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://www.expatliving.it/terms#articles-license"},"creditText":"Expat Living Italy (expatliving.it)","citeAs":"“How Good Is Healthcare Where You Want to Live in Italy?” by Caitlin, Expat Living Italy, 30 September 2026. https://www.expatliving.it/articles/healthcare-by-region-italy","requirement":"Free to use with credit: cite Expat Living Italy and link to the article."}}