“On Thursday morning I went to San Paolo Hospital to visit a relative of mine who was suffering from pneumonia. When I reached his room, on the fifth floor of the building, in the general medicine department, I found myself faced with an aberrant scene. Even though the needle had come out of his arm three hours earlier and his sheets were stained with blood in several places, no one intervened to change them.” This is the complaint of a woman who turned to the regional councilor of the Greens and member of the Health Commission Francesco Emilio Borrelli. “An elderly man,” the woman added, “had detached his catheter by himself, hurting himself and losing blood and urine. His sheets were in pitiful conditions. The people in the room with him told me that he had been in that condition since 4,30:1 in the morning and, despite the screams of pain and the calls of the bell, the operators had simply given him a blanket. But it doesn't end there. A third occupant of the room also had linens full of stains. They were not blood stains but they were definitely sheets that needed changing. The problem is that the patients appear abandoned to themselves, no one showed up for hours and hours”. All of this is documented by a video. “The images that can be seen in the video – says Borrelli – are terrible. I find it unacceptable that patients are left for hours in such conditions. We have sent a note to the ASL Napoli XNUMX asking for an internal investigation to be opened to determine the possible existence of disciplinary responsibilities and we want to know if this affair is also due to the poor service caused by the anti-mafia ban that has long affected the company that managed the supply and washing of sheets in hospitals. If any negligence were to emerge, we will ask for exemplary sanctions”.
On the other hand, the response of the general director of the ASL Napoli 1 Ciro Verdoliva was not long in coming, who in a note specified: "In these hours a video is circulating on WhatsApp chats and online in which images are edited to make people believe that the San Paolo hospital in Naples, in the Fuorigrotta neighborhood, is in conditions beyond the limits of decency, with patients abandoned in the dirt and without clean sheets for days. It is clearly a video that tends to demonstrate a situation very distant from reality, a video whose images were artfully constructed by a person who intruded into the department without any authorization" said Ciro Verdoliva. "Beyond the squalor of these actions, there is a total lack of respect for the patients, used without their knowledge and whose faces are given to the web in defiance of any respect for privacy - he adds - the only thing that this video demonstrates is, once again, how in Naples there is a circuit constantly engaged in generating, or attempting to generate, scandals regarding healthcare. A circuit of a few people who in this way mortify the work of doctors, nurses and social health workers who carry out their duty with great professionalism and dedication". Verdoliva also underlines that there is "neither at San Paolo, nor in any other facility of Napoli 1 Centro a bedsheet emergency".
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