Dramatic situation in the ward: 100 doctors a day leave and the competitions are deserted. Those who stay up to 10 nights a month and have to manage patients who remain on a stretcher for days and days because there are no beds
SOS first aid. The cry for help, this time, comes from the doctors who work there. We manage chronic overcrowding of under-staffed patients. In emergency-urgency departments almost 5 thousand units are missing. The shortage affects all of Italy, from North to South. In the first five months of 2022, about 600 colleagues have already resigned, both among the young and the elderly, and in nine out of ten structures at least one intends to leave within 12 months. They prefer private or other specialties, such as general medicine, someone else aesthetic medicine.
100 doctors a day leaving
Beniamino Susi denounces it on behalf of the Italian Society of Emergency-Urgency Medicine (Simeu), of which national vice president, who opened his on Friday national congress in Riccione (until May 15) and a week ago he submitted a questionnaire to over 400 emergency rooms in the country. More or less one hundred doctors a day since the beginning of the year they have given up their position. The equivalent of the team that forms four to five rescue centers, points out Susi, who heads the emergency department of ASL Roma 4. The malaise expressed by the white coats of the emergency room for difficult working conditions has been going on for years now. Simeu reports that the extinction of these wards is underway. The reasons complained about are theexcessive workload caused, in addition to the lack of staff, by the clogging of stretchers in the corridors and the prolonged stay of patients waiting for hospitalization (a phenomenon known as “boarding”), and unrewarding salaries. Every day we have up to 60-80 patients who stay for an average of three to ten days. It happens that they are never transferred to the competent department because it is full (Corriere del Mezzogiorno talked about it HERE) and we will dismiss them directly – continues the vice president Simeu -. It is up to us to take care only of the urgency, of the stabilization of the patient’s vital functions, of his first hours after entry. We can’t handle the rest as well.
Present dramatic situation
The shifts remain exhausting: My doctors do ten nights a month instead of the usual 4-5. An unsustainable rhythm, which does not allow the right psychophysical recovery. To meet the need for staff, the Ministry of Health has increased the state-funded specialization grants for the academic year 2020-2021 to 17,400, 4 thousand more contracts compared to those that existed until the previous year. But before the doctor completes the training and is available in the ward at least four years pass. Although according to the provisions of the 2019 maneuver and the Calabria decree, trainees from the third year onwards can be hired on a fixed-term basis by health companies (even those that are not part of the training network through an individual training project drawn up by the respective specialization school) . Meanwhile for many banned places go deserted remembers Susi. The latest sensational failure was that of competition organized by the Cardarelli hospital of Naples for six places in admission and emergency medicine and surgery to which no one has signed up. A flop was also the public competition for 153 seats in various emergency rooms and 118 in Lazio banned last September – reports Susi -. About sixty showed up on the day of the selection, about ten rejected and 50 admitted but all were already working on a fixed-term basis. Moral: no new resources have been introduced. With the end of the state of emergency Covid – he adds – we will also lose all the pensioners returned to the ward during the pandemic.
The lack of beds at the origin
The solidarity of citizens is fundamental: they must see us as allies, not enemies, our discomfort too, says the doctor. Carlo Palermo, national secretary of Anaao, the main union of hospital doctors, confirms the dramatic situation: If we go on like this, in the future there will be a hunt for health professions outside the borders national and there will be a risk of failing to ensure adequate assistance for all. At the origin of the criticality of the first aid, in addition to the question of personnel, Palermo argues, there is the cutting of hospital beds of the last years. Italy today – he recalls – has 3.1 beds per thousand inhabitants against a European average of 5.3. Germany has almost 8 per thousand inhabitants, France 5.8, Greece 4.1. Spain, on the other hand, has less than us, 2.9. Less also in Ireland, 2.8, and Sweden, 2. Hopefully with the territorial health reform just launched congestion in hospitals can finally be reduced. Today almost 80 per cent of access to the emergency room represented by white and green codes and of these about 95% did not hesitate in a hospitalization and could have been managed on the territory – underlines Palermo -. Community homes will therefore be able to treat non-urgent cases by streamlining emergency departments and community hospitals to absorb cases that require low and medium intensity interventions by freeing up beds for acute patients.
Incentive for the profession
To make the profession is more palatablein the budget law for 2022 aancillary allowance (starting from this year) for those who work in the emergency room, which is worth a total of 90 million euros, but for the increase in the paycheck, the allowance will first have to be included in the next national collective labor agreement. We are on the high seas – warns Palermo -. The 2016-2018 agreement was signed but remains largely inapplicable and that of the three-year period 2019-2021 has not yet been signed. Our doctors – closes the secretary Anaao – earn 40 percent less a year than their Western European colleagues.
May 14, 2022 (change May 14, 2022 | 09:23)
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