Liguria. Agreement reached between the Liguria Region and Alisa with general practitioners foropening on an experimental basis over 12 hours of a first aid clinic for low-intensity assistance at the Santa Maria di Misericordia Hospital in Albenga, with the direct use of primary care and continuity of care doctors affiliated with the regional health service.
“We have worked for avoid the closure of this strategic position and we have kept the commitment we made – affirms the councilor for health and President of the Liguria Region Giovanni Toti – in the awareness of the importance of the activity carried out by this hospital for the territory. This agreement is among the first of its kind at national level: it is a very important challenge, a system change – underlines Toti – in anticipation of the organization of assistance on the territory based on the Community Hospital and Community Homes which a fundamental role for general practitioners for the management of the emergency part of the continuity of care, according to the criteria set out in the NRP: the experimental system that will be tested in Albenga will then be extended to the other Community Hospitals in Liguria “.
The outpatient clinic, which represents the territorial assistance unit of reference for citizens, mainly guarantees a filter function with respect to hospital emergency rooms, with the care of patients with low-complexity outpatient pathologies and other patients, according to protocols shared with the Emergency Department of the ASL2 Savonese. Patient access through the Emergency-Urgency system is excluded (118).
As for the organization, the clinic will be open every day 12 hours, providing for the management and taking charge of patients the services of laboratory analysis, diagnostic imaging, specialist consultancy present, transport to another hospital for patients who need to be transferred, the nursing staff, the IT equipment and support staff. The clinic reports to the District Management from the organizational point of view and to the Medical Management of the Hospital Unit from the health and hygiene point of view.
The project involves only primary care doctors who have a single agreement or are associated with the Asl2. Participation is voluntary and must not compromise the regular conventional activity of the doctors involved towards their clients. The agreement provides for a duration of the experimentation equal to 12 months, which can be extended and in any case until the implementation of models linked to the NRP.
“He will come to Albenga the first experimentation of what will be the definitive structure of the territorial and hospital assistance system was put in place – continues president Toti – in which general practitioners take direct responsibility for low-complexity services. In essence, this is the first experimentation of the basic level of assistance according to the criteria of the Recovery Fund: the goal is ensure that all the low care complexity converges in these territorial structures, able to provide a more functional, more effective and also more appropriate response to citizens who will be able to self-present themselves in these clinics for all those mild pathologies, which are not ‘time dependent’, thus avoiding the crowding of the emergency rooms “.
The agreement reached will be submitted to the approval of the regional standing committee of general practitioners on November 16th and will be approved by the regional council in the session of November 19th.
Satisfaction was expressed on the part of the first citizen Ingauno Riccardo Tomatis: “This is a proposal that I had made in advance and on which I had worked together with the leaders of the ASL because I felt it was a solution, albeit temporary, to the risk of closing the First Intervention Point. Furthermore, it could be an opportunity for doctors who have recently obtained the agreements and who may have a small number of patients, to broaden their experiences by relating with specialist doctors who will still have to be present in the Albenga PPI “.
“This could also be a solution to the crisis of presence of family doctors in small municipalities which, having few inhabitants, cannot have an adequate number of patients, but who, by integrating their practice in the office with that in the hospital, could be encouraged to open a clinic even in the smaller municipalities of the hinterland which today often do not have one ”concludes Tomatis.