TRENTO. “ We will not be able to withstand the devastating impact of the Omicron variant in Trentino for long, which will not lead to a large number of hospitalizations but which will inevitably fall back on the care management of the family doctor “. These are the words used by Nicola Paoli general secretary of the CISL Medici del Trentino regarding the situation that is being experienced in the area with the fourth wave of infections.
A situation, explains Paoli in a note, further weighed down by the conditions in which some doctors have to operate. “There was talk of integrated groups with compensated secretaries: none of this is happening. Apss – explains Paoli – does not respond to the request of general practitioners to immediately activate the groups and the filter with the public becomes problematic for us. There was talk of giving free surgeries to family doctors. None of this. The Province can decide on a case-by-case basis and many Municipalities do not respond to this request. Especially in the Municipality of Trento, it is completely ignored by the municipality, charging the working doctors. The result is that in the next few days some constituencies, for example, will work with only one doctor in four with a population four times greater, having to close the second and third clinics due to the huge expenses “
For the CISL Medici, the heart of local medical assistance, thus risks being left unguarded in this tragic pandemic moment. Of the 43 places available on November 17, 2021, which is coupled with the previous one in March 2021, only a handful of doctors responded and 45,000 citizens will remain without care between now and Easter 2022.
“Many of our colleagues – explains Paoli – are leaving, stressed by two years of incessant work, poorly paid and with all the expenses at our expense, asking for early retirement or getting sick, and nobody comes to Trentino to be told by the Municipality of Trento that they have to pay for a secondary clinic, open only to stay close to non self-sufficient people and in difficulty”.
For Paoli, doctors do not “are supported“. “There are thousands of thousands of certifications of quarantine, isolation, telephone consultations and text messages that daily reach individual general practitioners from citizens” and all this is added to the incessant visits to the clinics, tampons and anticovid-19 vaccines that general practitioners from Trentino are also working, and not only.
“Holding this shock wave, in less than 300 doctors, is no longer possible. The lower clinical severity, inexorably, determines a load that is impossible to bear in the twelve hours we dedicate to them every day. They fear the revolution proposed by the new national law which will provide only 38 hours per week for each doctor, and which the Province of Trento itself will have to undergo, unthinkable with the current workload of our doctors. We are talking about thousands of people affected or who have Covid and we are told by the Districts that there are no longer Usca, foreseen by law for the home management of patients affected by Covid, in our obligatory replacement ”continues Nicola Paoli.
The numbers of infections are continuing to rise exponentially. “If this continues, the family doctors, at least two thirds of the 300, will definitively abdicate and the local assistance system will go into chaos, governed only by tampon pharmacists and community nurses.”.