by Maurizio Marzegalli
05 OTT – Dear Director,
in recent months, Integrated Home Assistance (ADI) has strongly returned to the attention of all citizens and families, and at the same time also under the eyes of those who reflect and try to “design” an innovative future that is attentive to the needs for our SSN. When we talk about Integrated Home Care we refer to a vast body of health, social, psychological interventions, which are often carried out in the face of chronicity and neoplasms, rare or seriously disabling diseases, and in the face of the terminal stages of existence. Recently the topic has attracted new and specific attention, also for many dysfunctions recorded in the SARS-CoV emergency period. 2.
In recent days, the newspaper directed by you published the proposal for a National Integrated Domiciliary Plan signed by the numerous organizations that adhere to the “Pact for a new welfare on non self-sufficient people” and addressed to the Government. At the same time, Cittadinanzattiva Lazio – through the voice of its secretary Elio Rosati – raised the alarm on the difficulty of accessing health services in its region in time of COVID.19, underlining the enormous difficulties faced by patients and their families in obtaining their own assistance. home specialist. Lastly, lto survey, fine-tuning from the Center for Applied Economic Research in Healthcare-Tor Vergata and the Rare Diseases Observatory, to collect the experiences of the many families who often face the heavy daily issues of rare diseases in absolute solitude.
These are all pieces of a strong need and concern: that ADI is finally understood, supported, relaunched. Home care is a fundamental link in the care system, in particular towards the chronic and pluri-pathological elderly patient, but also towards the many minors and young adults with serious pathologies and handicaps and their families who would otherwise be without any support.
Public structures and private realities are strongly involved in this area and the professionals involved have specific skills and experiences. On a daily basis, the Maddalena Grassi Foundation – with an experience that began 30 years ago, a company that offers services to the home of over 2500 patients per year that meet the specific health needs of the people it cares for – detects a fact: patients prefer to stay at home as much as possible, in the awareness that “it is always better to live at home”, if you are able to obtain services that meet your health needs.
In the years of activity we have also reached the awareness that in the chronic patient there have been pathological exacerbations, complications that require a continuous and intensive level of care, whether developed in hospice, in hospital facilities or in RSA.
Measures 5.1 and 6.1 of the PNRR (which mention and value the integration of home health care for the elderly and chronic patients) seem to indicate precisely this integration as the keystone of a future path. In this sense, integration with semi-residential and territorial residential services as well as integration with specialist-hospital services and social services is essential to guarantee a continuum of care for the individual health need.
In the experience we have just brought to the Milanese conference Take care of your neighbor as yourself: take care of the aging man – promoted by the religious association of socio-health institutes-ARIS and by the national union of institutions and social assistance initiatives-UNEBA with the patronage of the National Office for the Pastoral Care of Health of the Italian Bishops’ Conference – we stressed the need to make a common front among all the subjects involved in “taking care”, especially when it comes to subjects who have in their fragility the figure of an existence that can never be neglected.
We therefore believe, in the face of the attention that we find today towards ADI and which is expressed in authoritative positions, that it is necessary to avoid the temptation of the “claim” that places the different interpreters “against a wall”, perhaps making them clash with institutions (be they national or regional).
It is time for a united front between all care interpreters, so that care is ensured, people are all taken care of and no one is left behind. Exactly as Pope Francis has been proposing for years.
Maurizio Marzegalli
Cardiologist, Medical Referral for Home Care
Vice President of the Maddalena Grassi Foundation
05 October 2021
© All rights reserved
Other articles in Letters to the editor
