Il Coordination of Sardinian therapeutic communities – Ceas raise your voice again. Forced to draw general attention to a collapsing situation that has been dragging on for years, Ceas bought advertising space in the two main Sardinian newspapers to inform citizens and at the same time shake up the island’s political class. The reason is soon said. “An urgent provision that the Regional Council had included in the Omnibus law in November 2022, has not yet seen the outcome to date”, explains the regional coordinator Joan Grillo. «We have not seen a single euro of the 14 million euro envisaged for the tariff adjustment of addictions, territorial rehabilitation and RSA. This is partly attributable to the Regional Council, which has not yet resolved a fundamental issue: it has not said what goes to one and how much to the other».
“For weeks we have been waiting for the vote connected to the Finance Act: if this step is not taken, everything will remain at a standstill”, Grillo points out again. «For all of us this is not only an urgent but also an indispensable measure, as it can avoid the closure of other communities in addition to those already forced to close their doors. It must then be said that the regional assessor of health and social policies has been working since May 2021 in the same way, i.e. without involving our coordination. They have opened an internal technical table but they don’t want us sitting down to think and discuss with them, as happens in all virtuous regions. In this way there is no possibility of offering them a contribution of ideas that takes into account real experiences in the field. The regional offices work to define the requirements of our structures but we don’t know what the table has produced in these two years».
«What pains me most of all is the management of the current Regional Council, which excludes from the debate those who are on the front every day and, therefore, can bring their skills» adds Grillo. «The officials of the councilorship are locked up in a fort. A meeting with the Coordination has not been convened for over four years. Either they do not believe that the private sector can help them find solutions, or there is a deliberate will not to take account of the national law n. 502/1992, which recognizes equal dignity between public health and private accredited. Finally, it must be said that even at a national level, addiction policies have been forgotten for a long time, and this has contributed to registering a sudden increase in the most serious cases in a world that few are concerned with. Only now has the delegation been assigned to the undersecretary of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Alfredo Mantovano».
In 40 years of activity, Sardinian communities have welcomed and cared for over 30,000 people, supporting their families and social services. At the same time, they secured more than 600 jobs. “Hundreds of patients with addiction problems and related mental disorders would no longer have a safe and secure place to be treated in the coming months and would return to their territories, with a great risk both for families and for the municipalities of residence”, we read in the text published by Ceas, with reference to the possibility of closing new structures. Among the requests of the Coordination, the possibility of foreseeing the retroactivity of the tariff adjustment to 1 January 2023, to at least partially remedy the debts accrued in the meantime due to the undersized fees.