The family doctor: “Thrown to the front without protection. Now I’m dying”

PADOVA – “Dear President Conte, I am a family doctor and, like many other infected people, I am admitted to semi-intensive therapy with bilateral pneumonia. I do not know if I will see my wife and children again and now, from this bed, I would like to tell them that they must eliminate those who have not lived up to it. “The will of a general practitioner is an appeal to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. Domenico Minasola, 59, from Padua, uses the power of images to bring his words to their destination: he turns on his smartphone camera and shoots himself with a respirator. “I am one of the many doctors who are victims of the service. They have always taught me to respect the institutions, but I am outraged by the behavior of their committees and commissioners who have been caught off guard in this second wave of the pandemic ”.

Minasola has been hospitalized since Tuesday morning, when his condition worsened. He came from days of intense work in which, in addition to normal activity, he also had to perform a large number of tampons. It is precisely in the workplace where you probably contracted the virus. “His collaborators did not understand that the family doctors’ offices have become Covid clinics. And as such they should be protected with procedures and safety instructions that never came.”

The 59-year-old doctor has a practice in the area of ​​Sacro Cuore, a populous and multi-ethnic district of Padua. “They should have dressed us in overalls and diving suits and not just masks and gowns,” he released from the hospital bed, communicating exclusively with WhatsApp messages, when his strength allowed. “We needed organization by the Ministry of Health and the technical-scientific committee, which should give us precise provisions for individual protection and not just impose new measures on our clients.”

He too, like many other colleagues, had to organize to carry out antigen tests, as a consequence of the union agreement signed at the national level and collected by an ordinance of the Veneto Region. The interior spaces were inadequate, so a kind of external drive-in cinema was invented.

Local medicine has often been spoken of as a strategic factor in the fight against the pandemic, so as not to put too much pressure on hospitals. “I agree with the strategy – says Minasola – But with the protection, education and sanitation of the clinics, which we have always had to organize instead. Why do I have to risk my life, when there are those who spend their days commenting on the Rt index? it is still aware of what is happening to territorial medicine ”. Minasola has been a doctor for 35 years and swears that he has never repented once, not even now that the waters have turned stormy. I am writing to Conte, I hope that he is close and, above all, that he acts immediately: if there is something to improve, we must do it now. It is a battle that we must win and face together ”.
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