The general director of the Ausl Monica Calamai
Healthcare evolves, healthcare needs change and healthcare companies must be able to reorganize themselves as best as possible to optimize responses to citizens. It is in this context that the Local Health Authority of Ferrara presents a substantial reorganization of services through the establishment of seven new primary schools.
These are seven Complex Operating Units, adhering to the needs of the provincial territory and implemented and optimized with a view to integration. These are: Palliative Care, Territorial Rehabilitation, Intercompany Clinical Risk Management, Urology, Clinical Nutrition, Territorial Pneumology and Territorial Infectious Diseases.
“Even in the toughest periods of Covid, we didn’t stop planning and working to build the future of our healthcare – explains the director general of the Ferrara Local Health Authority. Monica Calamai -, and the future is being built with an eye that is increasingly attentive to the territory. Because this is foreseen in the National and Regional Health Plans but, above all, because this is how the emerging socio-health problems of our provincial population are addressed. The watchwords are taking charge and integration, between hospital and territory, to address chronicity and the increasingly complex health needs we are dealing with “.
The Operational Unit of Palliative Care, within the Primary Care Department, pursues the consolidation of the Local Palliative Care Network, which includes AUSL professionals and third sector realities involved in home and hospice care, to ensure access to palliative care and pain therapy in a bio-psycho-social perspective. Objectives to be achieved through the clinical-socio-assistance continuity of the cancer patient and not, in the advanced stage of the disease; an individualized care and support program for the patient and his / her family; training of professional profiles according to a model that puts the patient at the center; transversal and integrated assistance paths throughout the territory; and digital skills for the development of telemedicine.
The Operational Unit of Territorial Rehabilitation, as part of the Primary Care Department, is part of a multi-professional and multidisciplinary network that includes the new Rehabilitation Medicine of the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute at the Argenta hospital, the Cona and Delta hospital, the Codigoro Health House, local professionals and general practitioners to ensure an effective, timely, safe and all-encompassing service to the greatest number of patients. Inside and outside the hospital walls in an integrated way.
In addition to the use of telerehabilitation techniques; specialist consultancy and specific treatments in hospital wards and specialist visits for insertions into home care, it is in fact intended to build appropriate care paths to bring the patient to contain or minimize disability so that he can carry out the activities of daily life, favoring maintenance in the social context family and the prevention of loss of autonomy or motivation to participate.
The Intercompany Operational Unit Clinical risk management, to be placed on the staff of the management, deals with the risk prevention and management policies implemented by the accredited public and private health and social health structures, supporting the strategies for corporate risk reduction and litigation containment. In the field, coordination of risk managers, analysis of risks and adverse events, monitoring and harmonization of quality management and safety of care, implementation for patient safety, improvement of appropriateness in diagnostic and therapeutic paths, consultancy and training activities on the subject of legal medicine and bio-law.
The Operational Unit of Urology it will see the reabsorption of the existing simple management structures of the Cento and Delta Hospital, currently vacant, and will be established within the Intercompany Hospital Department with Integrated Activities (Dai) of Surgery, developed at the Delta hospital. A strategic decision to provide a single ‘direction’ for the treatment of all urological pathologies and prevention of their complications, first and second level outpatient visits, consultancy at territorial assistance points, day hospital, reception, counseling and taking into load of the patient, connection and integration with local professionals and family doctors.
The Operational Unit Clinical Nutrition, within the Primary Care Department, arises from the need to follow dietetic and artificial nutrition activities aimed at standardizing nutritional management. Preventive, diagnostic-therapeutic and rehabilitative activities are carried out at hospital and local level, including continuity of care and specialist outpatient activities (malnutrition, dysphagia, nephropathy, eating disorders, oncological diseases, severe obesity) and prison health. Also important is the analysis of eating disorders in collaboration with the Department of Mental Health in order to provide the right answer in the most critical and complex cases; and the diagnostic-therapeutic approach to identify the patient’s real problem and the possibilities of therapy in conjunction with professionals and family doctors.
The Operational Unit of Territorial Pulmonology, even more fundamental in these times of pandemic within the Department of Primary Care, deals with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the respiratory system, through a “global care” of the patient. With one more step: to expand outpatient activities that guarantee access to services by reducing the use of hospitalization in order to achieve the goal of “de-hospitalization” of the patient suffering from respiratory diseases. At the center of the project are in fact the outpatient clinic for Respiratory Pathophysiology, Respiratory Allergology, Pneumology, first-level outpatient clinic for respiratory disorders in sleep, pneumological home care, development of home oxygen therapy, home respiratory care and chronic outpatient clinic.
The Operational Unit Territorial Infectious Diseases, as part of the Primary Care Department, it will enter the network of provincial hospitals, residential structures and social and health structures with the assistance and availability of the infectious disease specialist every day 24 hours a day with full collaboration with the Emergency Urgency Department and Obi even in periods of maximum criticality. Among the functions in close collaboration with all institutions: development of the Day Service; specialist outpatient activities; assistance to the patient with HIV infection; use of innovative therapies; monitoring and correct use of antibiotics, antifungals and antivirals; sentinel agent monitoring; assistance to prisoners and migrants, all from a one health perspective.