Nurses' complaint: "Emergency rooms stormed. We can't take it anymore and patients are paying the consequences"

Hospital facilities are constantly struggling, unable to manage the sudden increase in patients without exposing the public to serious inconvenience. Chronic staff shortages and organizational shortcomings, particularly the well-known lack of beds to deal with the expected hospitalization emergency, have transformed the month of December into a veritable hell. On the one hand, for healthcare 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 healthcare system that appears to be adrift, 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 structures, despite the immense efforts of the professionals who work in the emergency rooms and in the critical departments, are unable to cope - De Palma reports - Without serious healthcare consequences, the serious impact of the excess patient numbers is evident. Just consider the case of the Cardarelli hospital in Naples, the largest in the South, but similar cases have also been recorded in regions where the nursing shortage is now at a point where it's difficult to recover, such as in Campania..

"200 patients a day, beds crowded together in corridors, a local healthcare system completely incapable of ensuring balanced patient management, leaving only the most complex cases to emergency rooms, as they should be, thus streamlining hospitalizations and entrusting, for example, patients with less serious conditions to local clinics only."

"What would have happened, we ask ourselves at this point, if, instead of facing sporadic cases of influenza and increases in Covid infections—fortunately, in most cases no longer life-threatening—we had found ourselves facing 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 despite emerging from the harsh lesson of Covid with broken bones, we have truly learned nothing. Authoritative investigations reveal, for example, that in Lazio alone, there are currently over 1100 patients waiting for admission in emergency rooms; this figure rises to 500 in Piedmont, while in Lombardy, regular hospitalizations have been suspended precisely because of overcrowding. Simply put, it took the seasonal flu, albeit aggressive, and an overall manageable and expected increase in cases related to the new Covid variants to literally overwhelm our hospitals.

"It's obvious - he claims - That politics, with the government on one side and the regions on the other, have reached the point where they need to do a thorough soul-searching. In Europe, our country ranks 16th in per capita spending: compared to the average of other nations, we are facing a veritable abyss, a gap of 47,6 billion. And today, at the end of a hellish December for our hospitals, the facts speak for themselves. They reveal a policy that has long been incapable of managing an emergency that has worsened, day by day becoming structural, to the detriment of the services our National Health Service should guarantee to its citizens.

"Meanwhile, we have already responded to the words and proclamations of the undeniable and profound crisis in the Italian healthcare system with the strike of December 5th, and we will do so again, in anticipation of a spring that promises to be a time of legitimate protests and the unfortunately real risk of new strikes.", concludes De Palma.