The collaboration between the Mediterranean pediatric cardiology center of the San Vincenzo hospital in Taormina (Messina) and the Bambino Gesù hospital in Rome cannot cease. The Parents’ Committee of the cardiac surgery centre, which has repeatedly been the protagonist of demonstrations in front of the hospital, explains in a note that «the possible conclusion of the relationship with the Taormina facility is generating fear, anger and desperation among hundreds of Sicilian families. For us this is not an administrative practice. It’s not a political issue. Here we talk about the lives of our children.”
«The Center – they add – has grown thanks to the collaboration with Bambino Gesù and thanks to the work of highly specialized professionals who have allowed many Sicilian children to be treated without leaving their homeland». In recent days, the leaders of the Roman hospital communicated with a letter to the ASP Messina, and for information to the regional health department and the San Vincenzo hospital, their desire not to extend the agreement which allowed the activation of pediatric cardiac surgery in 2010, which for years was unique in Sicily.
“We parents cannot accept it”, underlines the Committee which says it is ready to return to the fight to defend “a sacrosanct right, the right to health and to maintain a life-saving center in Sicily for children with heart disease”. Because while politics discusses, postpones, promises and releases responsibilities, there are families who live in fear of having to return to medical migration, desperate journeys outside the region, enormous expenses, family separations and suffering that no one should ever have to face”, they continue.