The line of 118 doctors increasingly thin and fragile. Too few (as well as those of the medical guard) and with the aggravating circumstance that now the shifts for the holidays start and that many move to better employment going to occupy the boxes of general practitioners left uncovered by retirements. Because it is less tiring and much better paid work.
The question is inevitable, also given the concomitance with the start of a summer season that promises to be at least crowded: how will the ambulance upgrade service be guaranteed if the 118 service is also compromised? One figure above all, which tells better than pages and pages what level of emergency Molise is experiencing. 118 doctors should be 96, but in reality there are 56.
40 white coats are missing, and the announcement published some time ago by Asrem for to find 25 figures with the requisites to work in the emergency stations, only 4 interested parties replied. Once again you will have to deal with forward contracts, additional benefits, with all that goes with it. Once again, territorial medicine forced to deal with impossible downsizing.
The Uil, through the secretary Tecla Boccardo, has already launched an alarm that adds to the umpteenth appeal of the Molise Forum in defense of public health on the serious shortage of personnel.
After the basic services, even 118 in the ax of the cuts
“Some of the current 118 stations, the last remaining garrisons in the area to ensure timely medical aid to Molise – says Tecla Boccardo – will be lacking the figure of the doctor because there are not enough. Twenty years after the launch of the 118 service in Molise, nothing has changed, indeed it is getting worse. The inertia of politics is unacceptable. It is now known to all that in Molise not only are minimum essential levels of assistance not guaranteed, but also the territorial emergency service is beginning to be in trouble, while the network for the emergency of time dependent pathologies has never existed “.
I doctors are not enough, and some 118 stations will have to fall back on the exclusive use of the nurse and the volunteer rescuer. However, this will lead to an extension of the rescue times and an unknown factor on the time dependent pathologies. In fact, if the doctor is missing from the 118 mobile station, and if the doctor will be called from a nearby station only on the basis of the severity of the case, as will be done in the presence of strokes, ischemias, road accidents (which, moreover, multiply with a worrying frequency. during the summer)? The maximum time for a rescue of this type is, according to regulatory references, equal to 20 minutes. If time plays a decisive role but the doctor can only arrive at a later time, who will guarantee that human lives will be saved?
Serious problem, very serious. “It is clear – adds the clinical pathologist Giancarlo Totaro – that the emergency system like the current one with these rhythms will not be able to withstand the migration of doctors to other services for long“. Yes, because the doctors in charge of the 118 and the medical guard continue to leave the service for other better-paid activities and considered less burdensome, in particular to take on general medicine tasks. A widespread phenomenon throughout the region that leads, also due to the lack of incentives for hard work like that of 118, the white coats of the emergency network to leave this role as soon as they can to take on another, better paid and less stressful one.