The Veneto Region orders new measures to combat the Covid-19 epidemic and among these it is established that “For all operators in service at public and private territorial hospital and socio-medical health structures (residential and semi-residential) must be increased the frequency of testing of screening programs, providing for a test every 4 days, regardless of the state of vaccination “.
“The measure is particularly incisive, taking into account that the previous indication provided for a frequency of 10 days between one sampling and the next”, commented Paolo Santesso and Maria Chiara Santin as referents of the Presidents of the Service Centers of District 1 at the Residential system elderly people. «First of all, we note how both types of swabs currently used in screening aimed at operators of Service Centers for elderly people (rapid fourth generation and molecular) involve the analysis laboratories of the Healthcare Companies. Our common experience in this regard is that due to the very recrudescence of the contagion that motivates the measures of the DGR 172/2021 and the consequent overload of work that weighs on the analysis laboratories, it happens with a certain frequency that the results of the swabs carried out also arrive a few days after sampling “.
Santesso and Santin doubt that the test every four days will receive a quick and effective response: “We imagine that if the whole system were further stressed by the new frequency of screenings, there is reason to fear an increase in these delays such as to potentially cancel the benefit. expected. We would also like to point out that, being able to count only on the performance of health workers adequately trained for the execution of the tampons, if we were to continue to provide them with internal staff, it would even be the sustainability of the health care and assistance activities that take place in our facilities. be questioned “.
The problem of lack of personnel always arises. «The dramatic shortage of nursing staff is well known, the solution of which does not appear to be achievable in the short term. Therefore, we do not believe that shifting the orientation of our resources even further towards screening activities is the right strategy to guarantee the best level of well-being of the people who reside in our Centers. Also taking into account the fact that, due to the characteristics of sensitivity and sensitivity of the rapid swabs that are used, not even the activation of the powerful screening activity that the regional law provides would produce a monitoring that can be defined as infallible “.
“Last but not least”, Santesso and Santin write again in the joint statement, “we would like to highlight how the creation of new, and important, obligations that come to burden the managers of the Service Centers actually determines a double situation. speed. On the one hand, the structures relating to public health which, in the face of new commitments, can count on an increase in the human and economic resources needed to cope with them; on the other hand, the structures of the Service Centers which see obligations added to the list of those deriving from the specific conventions that regulate relations with public health, without this being followed by a change in the availability to draw on. Indeed, the first reflection of this mechanism is precisely the well-known migration of health professionals from the latter to the former ”.
We therefore believe that in order to achieve the goal set by the Veneto Region with the DGR 172, greater involvement of the Health Authorities is essential, also through material collaboration in the execution of the swabs, in supporting the effort that the fight against the pandemic, which certainly is a health issue, requires the community.
