Hospital, the San Martino ward reopens admissions to patients without covid Since January it had hosted only positive patients. Unions half satisfied
ORISTANO. After almost two months, in the internal medicine ward of the San Martino hospital, normalcy returns. In fact, ordinary activity has resumed with the exclusive hospitalization of patients negative for the Sars Cov-2 virus. “During the last period, which lasted from January to the beginning of March, 61 patients passed through the Covid area of the Medicine department, most of whom were discharged home healed”, explains the ASL with a communication.
In early February, a covid outbreak had broken out in the ward, with infections both among patients and staff: doctors, but above all nurses, so much so that it was necessary to find nurses and social health workers from other ASL structures. At the same time, the ward was divided, creating an area for covid patients only. It had been a choice dictated by the need to cope with the emergency of the emergency room, which in those days also had twelve positive patients in the short observation area and awaiting transfer to suitable wards. Those were terrible days, difficult to forget, between the impossibility of finding a place for the most serious patients in the intensive care wards of Cagliari and Sassari and several sick people who stopped living in the emergency room where, in the meantime, the great part of the few doctors available to the ward, so much so as to force those on duty to work uninterrupted shifts of 18 hours.
The emergency led to ask for the availability of doctors in other areas of the hospital to cover the shifts of absent colleagues. All this while for some time now at San Martino there has been recourse to “rented” doctors, hired through temporary agencies. Now the resumption of ordinary activity in internal medicine has also been positively welcomed by the trade unions. “It’s good news, San Martino is finally back to being a non-covid hospital – says Luigi Curreli, secretary of the medical union Anaao Assomed -. It must in fact be considered that this hospital does not have the personnel and financial resources to be a Covid hospital “. More critical Salvatore Seoni, provincial secretary of the public service of the CISL: “It is true that the Medicine department has resumed normal health activities and has been reunited in a single department, so from that point of view the situation has certainly improved However, the chronic shortage of medical and nursing personnel remains, which unfortunately does not represent a temporary situation, but constitutes a structural fact that has been dragging on for some time. Situation that causes difficulties in organizing and adequately guaranteeing work shifts. Health professionals are engaged in a grueling and intense work, they are having great difficulty in managing ordinary activities, despite the great commitment and sense of responsibility they put into it to face the many daily problems ».