Healthcare is a tangle of human currents that form dangerous undertows within the emergency room of the hub hospital. The rooms of the emergency departments have for years been a kind of black hole into which everything falls and from which everything returns. Places under siege with sick people parked everywhere, on stretchers, wheelchairs, chairs and stools. Suffering humanity remains in line for a place in the ward that never arrives because in the various treatment areas there are not enough beds to accept everyone. They say that the fault lies with a territorial sieve network with peripheral hospitals that continue to pour patients onto the “Annunziata”, whose front line, also due to the work in progress, has once again become a place of suffering and shadows, with no more places available. In those rooms men and women wait for a response, a cure. They are people who come from the most diverse places, near and far places in a province, left without territorial garrisons. And they are all there to heal.
The hole of general practitioners
The history of zero-mile healthcare returns to the edge of the abyss, the mathematical abyss that seems to be degrading towards an ever deeper emergency. A world that accumulates patients queuing for everything in the Cosentino area traces the trail of a system that seems to be rolling towards the riskiest edge. The numbers are the mirror of a complex reality that deforms as time passes and as general practitioners (this is the new definition of family doctors) abandon themselves due to reaching age limits or to change destination or assignment. The “hole” is huge. In the Cosentino area, assistance to borrowers should be guaranteed by 508 doctors but as many as 60 are missing and they represent the stigmata of years of lack of (or incorrect) planning at central level. A vertigo generated by spending cuts that have produced other expenses and other cuts. Savings have been made on the health system, economies that have produced fragility in local assistance. There are no doctors and none can be found. The ASP is trying to convince pensioners to remain in service until they are 72 years old. In the meantime, he hopes that reforms and the medicine of the future will serve to cover the gaps.
SOS medical guards
For now, it would be better not to get sick, especially in small towns where continuity of care is often not guaranteed even with a family doctor. The medical guards are now at risk of disappearing. On paper there should be 492, 326 are missing. And, often, in closed offices the phone rings empty.
Read the complete article in the paper edition of Gazzetta del Sud – Cosenza