“Hospital facilities in constant suffering, unable to manage, without exposing citizens to serious inconvenience, the sudden increase in patients: the chronic lack of staff and organizational shortcomings, in particular the well-known lack of beds to deal with the expected hospitalization emergency, have transformed the month of December into a real hell, on the one hand for health professionals, forced to give up their holidays and shoulder an unbearable burden, on the other, the community is once again faced with the harsh reality of a health system that appears to be a ship adrift, which seems to be taking on water from all sides”. Thus Antonio De Palma, national president of the trade union of nurses Nursing Up, comments on what happened in the Italian healthcare system in the past month, supported by data from recent authoritative investigations, cross-referenced with those that the union has been carrying out for some time.
“We are not at all surprised by the desolate reality that we find ourselves having to tell: our hospital facilities, despite the immense efforts of the professionals who work in the emergency rooms and in the critical departments, are unable to cope – denounces De Palma – without serious consequences for healthcare, the serious impact that the surplus of patients generates. Just think of the case of the Cardarelli in Naples, the largest hospital in the South, but similar cases have also been recorded in Regions where the shortage of nurses is now at a point of difficult return, like Campania”.
“Influxes of 200 patients a day, beds crowded together in the corridors, a territorial health system totally incapable of allowing a balanced management of the sick, leaving to the emergency rooms, as it should happen, only the truly more complex cases, thus streamlining hospitalizations and entrusting, for example, only to local clinics, patients with less serious pathologies”.
“What would have happened, we ask ourselves at this point, if, instead of finding ourselves faced with sporadic cases of influenza and increases in Covid infections, fortunately, in most cases no longer dangerous to human life, we had found ourselves faced with a new real health emergency?”, asks the trade unionist.
“It comes naturally to us to observe – continues the president of the nurses' union Nursing Up – that even though we have come out with broken bones from the harsh lesson of Covid, we have really learned nothing. Authoritative investigations reveal to us, for example, that, in Lazio alone, there are currently over 1100 patients waiting for hospitalization in the emergency rooms; they reach 500 in Piedmont, while in Lombardy ordinary hospitalizations have been suspended precisely because of overcrowding. In short, the seasonal flu, albeit aggressive, and an overall manageable and expected increase in cases related to the new variants of Covid were enough to literally send our hospitals into a tailspin”.
"It's obvious - argues - that politics, with the Government on one side and the Regions on the other, have reached the point of having to do a thorough examination of conscience. In Europe, our country is in fact 16th in per capita spending: compared to the average of other nations, we are facing a real abyss, a gap of 47,6 billion. And today, at the end of a month of December that was nothing short of hellish for our hospitals, the facts speak for themselves. They are the ones that tell of a policy that has been incapable, for some time, of managing an emergency that has worsened, day after day becoming structural, to the detriment of the services that our NHS should guarantee to citizens”.
“In the meantime, we have already given our response to the words and proclamations, in the face of the undeniable and profound crisis of Italian healthcare, with the strike of last December 5th and we will give it again, in view of a spring that is announced as a period of legitimate protests and with the risk, unfortunately concrete, of new strikes”, concludes De Palma.
Article published on 4 January 2024 - 10:58
Video Chronicles
