First Aid / Citizens (Aiop): intervening on the shortcomings of emergency medicine | Healthcare24

“The requests made by the specialist doctors of the emergency rooms and 118 testify to the difficulties that the emergency and urgent medicine sector is going through, with a dramatic shortage of personnel and inhuman work shifts. The availability, in this regard, shown by the Minister of Health Schillaci is an important signal: politics is finally opening up to a serious and concrete confrontation to solve the problems of citizens and those who work to support a high level of quality of our Service national health“. This was stated by Barbara Cittadini, national president of Aiop, the Italian private hospital association, regarding the protest of emergency and 118 health workers, who responded to the initiative promoted by the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine (Simeu ) to ask for targeted interventions in Italian emergency rooms.
Cittadini adds: “In Italian hospitals and emergency rooms, the situation is very delicate, the shortage of medical and nursing staff significantly lengthens waiting times and degrades the quality of care provided to patients. The availability of beds is increasingly limited and it is difficult to guarantee an adequate planning of interventions, also due to the few ambulances available in the structures and the poor territorial coverage of first aid”.
The president of Aiop shares the proposals made in this regard by Fiaso, the Italian federation of health and hospital companies, which asks for higher salaries for those who work in the emergency room, recruitment of trainees, institution of the single emergency-urgency doctor. “I hope – underlines Cittadini – that the Government invests adequately in terms of resources and planning. It is necessary to manage, with a great sense of responsibility, these and other critical issues affecting healthcare, such as the high cost of services, drugs and personal protective equipment, the building and technological modernization of structures, digitalisation, the reduction of lists waiting times, care for non-Covid patients, outsourcing of services. Aiop, which represents the private law component of the NHS, is ready to support this renewal process. We make our professionalism, our structures, our know-how and equipment available to help guarantee, together with the public law component, a healthcare offer of excellence” concludes Cittadini.