Home » “Diseases and prevention? Forget”. Visits, boom in requests. And you stay in the queue

“Diseases and prevention? Forget”. Visits, boom in requests. And you stay in the queue

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The corridor of a hospital (Ansa archive photo)

Florence, 7 December 2021 – Continues the boom in requests for visits and exams. Between September and November, more than 25% of prescriptions were recorded in Tuscany compared to the same period in 2019. An increase due to an increased need to check the state of health after a year and a half in which citizens due to Covid they were removed from health facilities. “In 2020 there were in Italy 110 thousand more deaths than in the previous 5 years, 30% of excess mortality is not attributable to the pandemic virus but to the fact that hospitals have worked by focusing on Covid patients. It is normal that after a year and a half in which other diseases have been neglected, a need for health erupts beyond the pre-pandemic period “, says the national secretary of the Anaao hospital doctors union, Carlo Palermo.

The increase in demand in Tuscany came at a time when the taps for the ‘red’ of healthcare spending had been tightened. As the demand increased, health care companies increased their supply by 5%. The obvious gap between prescriptions and services offered has led to the lengthening of the waiting lists. “There is a worsening of health conditions that is accompanied by requests for visits and exams, but the waiting lists in our country are now measured in years – says Palermo -. The hospitals have turned their forces on Covid patients, neglecting the other diseases: in Tuscany, for example, breast cancer operations in 2020 were reduced by 20%, those in the colon by a third and hospitalizations for heart attacks by 25% “.

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Now people can’t wait any longer. Instead she is forced to do so. Of almost 100,000 visits and examinations prescribed by family doctors between 1 and 15 November, only just over 60,000 resulted in reservations: 4 out of 10 prescriptions are lost along the way (and many end up in private) due to the difficulty of finding access to the booking system.

For specialist visits the major critical issues are for cardiology, urology, gynecology, endocrinology, while for the exams Tuscany is in trouble for some disciplines also linked to the monitoring of Covid patients (cardiology, pneumology and neurology areas). Also in this case there is an increase in demand, directly related to Covid patients who need checks that Tuscany guarantees for free. There are many cases of Long Covid. The services for which there is more suffering are endoscopies (gastroscopy and colonoscopy), spirometry, electromyography, electrocardiogram, echocolordoppler. Because of this the regional councilor for the right to health Simone Bezzini is preparing a series of measures, including the activation of correct procedures during the prescription phase: it is essential that the doctor indicates precisely whether it is a first access or a subsequent access, and multiply the booking channels for first visits, from call centers to pharmacies, from apps to online booking (still underused) to direct booking of family doctors with rapid ‘fast track’ routes for emergencies.

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