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The new legislation, according to rumors, provides for the voluntary adherence of white coats and a possible contractual addition to the collective bargaining agreement for general practitioners
by Nicola Barone
The new legislation, according to rumors, provides for the voluntary adherence of white coats and a possible contractual addition to the collective bargaining agreement for general practitioners
3 ‘reading
To decongest the testing system, so-called quick swabs could soon enter general practitioners’ offices and pharmacies. During the meeting with the Regions, the Minister of Health Roberto Speranza announced the beginning of an ad hoc experimentation phase in the face of the floods registered in many places. From the serological tests already carried out in some Regions, we are now also analyzing the antigenic drugs that will be carried out directly in the pharmacy as is happening in Trento, anticipates the minister. It is a true race against time to quickly identify new infections, to proceed to isolation, avoiding the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus. No one in the executive has doubts about the need to strengthen the current system considering the other 16,079 cases in one day, a thousand more than yesterday but with fewer swabs (170,392 in the last 24 hours compared to 177,848) and a ratio between new cases and swabs. made. it returned to 9.4%, the highs of the second wave.
We are going to agree with family doctors
In general, there is agreement with the Regions in simplifying the tracking procedures (“We have already reduced the quarantine to 10 days and eliminated the second buffer, we are ready to look for new specific areas of intervention,” explains Speranza). Family doctors, the State-Regions Conference and unions are summoned on Monday for an agreement on rapid tests for general practitioners. The new legislation, according to rumors, provides for the voluntary adherence of white coats and a possible contractual addition to the collective bargaining agreement for GPs.
The affected perimeter
The public deed indicates that this activity is limited to the period of the influenza epidemic in the national territory in order to favor the differential diagnosis between the two diseases. It also provides for the participation of free choice primary care physicians and pediatricians “to prevent the strengthening of these activities from affecting only the Departments of Public Health.” The agreement, as stated in the document, establishes that the provision of tests is not limited exclusively to primary care physicians and pediatricians of free choice, but also to professionals from other areas of affiliated medicine such as continuity-of-care physicians, physicians holders of the positions referred to in article 60 of Presidential Decree 270/2000, territorial health emergency doctors, doctors of the medical service, as well as other organizational forms of territorial assistance such as, for example, the Usca. The agreement provides for the regulation of any financial recognition of the performance of rapid antigenic swabs by free choice primary care physicians and pediatricians, it being understood that for the rest of the professionals the remuneration for the activity is already included in the hourly remuneration. conventional activity.
Valid alternative salivary test to nasopharyngeal swab
It is to be expected that other advances in terms of diagnostics will also come from technologies under study or even at a more advanced level. Saliva, for example, is an ideal diagnostic sample to scan for the virus and can be used with rapid and sensitive commercially available systems. This is what emerges from a research recently published in the journal Virus, carried out at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases “Lazzaro Spallanzani” in Rome (InmiI) in collaboration with the Bambino Gesù pediatric hospital in Rome, the University College of London and the DiaSorin Biomedical Society. “The results explain Inmi in a note: they show that saliva is an equally valid sample compared to the nasopharyngeal swab and bronchoalveolar lavage that are currently used as the gold standard for the detection of SARS-CoV-2.” Furthermore, the saliva sample “is less invasive and easier to collect than the nasopharyngeal swab and, even more so, compared to bronchoalveolar lavage.”
The team of researchers analyzed 337 saliva samples from 164 patients admitted to the Inmi, comparing them with the same number of nasopharyngeal swabs and finding a very high degree of agreement in the results.
