The alarm of doctors about the solidity of the Italian health system

10/13/2020 Health



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Quasi 600 health workers, mainly of Bergamo but also from the rest of Lombardy, Brescia including, they signed a letter to be sent to the institutions to express their fear of the second wave of COVID-19. «The foreseeable scenario will be characterized by a notable increase in requests for health services and actions. The risk is that the entire system will be subdued again extreme stress, delaying the treatment of other pathologies ”, write the doctors.

Doctors are convinced that «to achieve an efficient and orderly management of events population discipline alone cannot be enough, which allowed us to get out of the crisis phase and imagine a new normal, but we need a coordinated and forward-looking response from the institutions in charge, the one implemented so far is not enough.

For this they ask for interventions to reduce the risk of contagion in hospitals. “Reduction of the waiting lists of patients with chronic cancer, reduction of the waiting lists of elective patients, definition of clear and safe clean and dirty pathways, creation of fast pathways to take Covid patients to out-of-hospital management early, and creation of fast lanes to lead chronic patients of any kind, who are the most vulnerable to the epidemic, in early out-of-hospital management. Subsequently, those who signed the letter proposed eleven out-of-hospital actions to prevent the health system from collapsed again as at the most acute moment of the pandemic last March.

The problem affects the entire national territory. With current numbers of the pandemic, in fact, «Italian hospitals they can last at least 5 months and for the moment the situation is manageable, but if we were to witness an exponential increase in cases as is happening in other countries such as France, then the hospital system would have a life of no more than two months ”, he says. Carlo Palermo, the secretary of the largest Italian hospital doctor unions, Anaao-Assomed. If we go from about 5,000 cases of contagion per day to more than 10,000 as in France, he points out, “There is a risk of collapse of the first trench of the hospital. anti-Covid, because hospitals are not prepared to face an exponential epidemic. “Now,” he warns, “criticalities are beginning to be recorded, starting with the lack of health personnel and structures that do not always guarantee differentiated paths.”

The problem of “lack of hospital health personnel – explains Palermo – is not a new problem. We have already inherited from the past a shortage of 6 thousand doctors determined by the block in billing. But now, with the pandemic, the situation has worsened because the increase in beds in intensive and sub-intensive care obviously also requires an increase in health and medical personnel. It would be necessary – he emphasizes – to hire at least another four thousand doctors ». To date, Palermo says, “we are recording a general shortage of about ten thousand doctorsIn fact, in recent months there have been some five thousand hires, but they are fixed-term, precarious or self-employed contracts. The problem, therefore, has not been resolved at its roots and the suffering situation in the hospitals remains ”.