There will be a “medical presence” 24 hours a day seven days a week, together with the nurses (12 hours a day for 7 days). There will also be specialists such as the psychologist, the speech therapist, the physiotherapist, the dietician, the rehabilitation technician and the social worker, but when necessary also the cardiologist, the pulmonologist or the diabetologist.
Here Italians will be able to obtain in addition to the classic medical examination also primary diagnostic services to monitor their health conditions, a service especially useful for those chronic patients who will be able to access equipment such as ultrasound scanners, electrocardiographs, retinographs, oct, spirometers. Finally, there will also be a point for sampling and screening as well as for vaccinations. Finally, here you can also find the classic services for booking visits and hospitalizations (the Cup) and you can activate the assistance directly at home or the new telemedicine services as well as services for mental health, addictions or social care.
Towards a “next” NHS
Here is the identikit of the community houses, “the physical, proximity and easily identifiable place to which the assisted person can access in order to get in touch with the health, social and health care system”, as the draft of the document states. to which Agenas – the Agency for regional health services – and the Ministry of Health works on «Models and standards for the development of territorial assistance in the National Health Service».
There will be 1,288 of these new structures – one for every 40-50 thousand inhabitants -, an evolution in some way of the experience of the Health Homes (widespread above all in Tuscany, Emiila and Veneto). which will have to open its doors by mid-2026 by exploiting the two billion euros ensured by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) as the first response to the lesson of Covid when the trench of care outside hospitals collapsed miserably. A lesson that makes Health Minister Roberto Speranza continually say that it is necessary “to start thinking about a national health service that is close, close, in the immediacy of the needs of the citizen”.
In fact, the community homes will have to work as a filter on the territory to avoid improper access to hospitals, managing in particular elderly and chronic patients with multiple pathologies that often have relapses that, worsening, eventually lead to hospitalization. And they will do it in close synergy with family doctors and pediatricians who will also have the opportunity to work within the community houses where they will be able to have the “physical location” of their forms of team aggregation. Or they will do so from their private practices and clinics that will work closely with the new facilities.