Guaranteeing all children the right to pediatric care up to the age of 18 both on the territory and in hospitals, without differences linked to the Region in which they were born and live, as is already the case in other countries such as France, Great Britain, Holland, Poland and Sweden. This is the request that comes from the States General of Pediatrics, summoned today to the Ministry of Health by the Italian Society of Pediatrics.
Although according to WHO and Italian law, childhood includes everyone under the age of 18, the right to pediatric care in our country “unnaturally” stops at 14 for pediatricians. After this age, in fact, children can no longer be followed up by the pediatrician of their choice, but end up in the care of the adult doctor (with the exception of children with chronic pathologies who remain in the care of pediatricians up to 16 years of age) . The situation of hospital assistance is more complicated, for which the situation differs from Region to Region and even within the same Region. “With the consequence that over 25% of children between 0-17 years, 1 out of 4, is hospitalized in adult wards” as underlined by the president of Sip Annamaria Staiano, and about 85% of patients between 15 and 17 years it is managed in conditions of promiscuity with adult and elderly patients and by personnel who are not specialized in assisting subjects in the developmental age. A situation that particularly concerns intensive care. Pediatric hospitals are few and poorly distributed: just 26 in all of Italy, with only 202 beds and an average of 3 beds per 1 million inhabitants against 8 in Europe. So many pediatric patients are hospitalized in intensive care for adults. “All of this is unacceptable. As paediatricians we defend the pediatric specificity, i.e. the right of children and adolescents to be treated in environments dedicated to them and by personnel specifically trained for the developmental age”, adds Staiano. “The legislator intervenes – concludes Giovanni Corsello, of the University of Palermo -. We ask to guarantee in the Essential Levels of Assistance Services (LEP) the raising of the pediatric age to 18 years, in hospitals in the area”.
“It is a working hypothesis” that on the possible raising of the pediatric age as regards treatments to 18 years, as requested by the Italian Society of Pediatrics, in other parts of Europe there is this time horizon, said the undersecretary of Salute Marcello Gemmato, on the sidelines of the States General of Pediatrics. “I register that the proposal could be useful – he adds – and will have the maximum attention of the Ministry, to the extent that today there is a lack of general practitioners and therefore lighten them by allowing pediatricians of free choice to be able to take charge of young people up to 18 years of age it serves to loosen the ‘grip’ on general medicine”.
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