Established the funds of the NRP and the number of structures to be built. Community homes and hospitals, territorial operations centers: the Region must submit the plan by the end of the year. Delays are not allowed, under penalty of having to say goodbye to financing
It is worth 271 million and 500 thousand euros on Pnrr for Piedmontese healthcare. Money that must be able to spend, avoiding delays in the schedule indicated by theEuropean Union lead to the loss of a unique opportunity to concretely strengthen territorial medicine. Because it is precisely on this aspect of health, whose shortcomings have been dramatically exposed by the pandemic, that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan focuses.
The overall figure is the sum of the costs established for three types of structures, the number of which for each region was established in the plan prepared by theAgents, as explained by the regional director of health Mario Minola speaking at a webinar of the association Healthcare Engine. The Recovery Plan provides for the realization of Community houses, of Territorial operational centers and of Community hospitals. The first, which must be 93 in Piedmont and whose completion is set to take place by 2026, will be structures where all basic health services are provided. Places where family doctors, key figures of the Community House, and pediatricians of free choice work as a team, in collaboration with family nurses, outpatient specialists and other health professionals such as speech therapists, physiotherapists, dieticians, rehabilitation technicians and still others. Also provided for the presence of social assistants and a withdrawal point. Each facility will be equipped with 10, 15 consulting and examination rooms, basic diagnostic services, such as ultrasound, electrocardiography, radiology, spirometry.
For these outposts of territorial health – whose offices, as well as those of community hospitals and territorial operational centers, must be defined by the Region, in collaboration with the Local Health Authorities, by the end of the year – the use of existing structures and in many cases no longer used, but adaptable with building interventions. Where this is not possible, they will have to be built from scratch.
The problem for the operational centers in Piedmont will be 43 less complex, in many cases coinciding with the current health districts which in the project represent the fulcrum of the coordination of local services. With a role of primary importance of telemedicine, a tool that in Piedmont is already seeing some experimental projects even before the Recovery Plan. The cost for each plant was set at 1.5 million. Costs that obviously do not include those for the staff and this will probably be a problem in the reorganization of the territorial health system and its closer connection with the hospital network.
It is not an absolute novelty, since Piedmont has been open for some years to this type of structures, the Community Hospital. Of the 381 planned throughout the country, Piedmont will have 27, each with about twenty beds that can reach up to double. Their function is, at least on paper, very important in linking the hospital system to the territorial one. They are beds intended for patients requiring low or medium clinical intensity therapy and for short-term hospitalizations. They should serve to decongest the emergency rooms and, at the same time, to provide an intermediate hospitalization for those discharged from acute care facilities and who are not yet in the conditions to continue treatment at home or in the RSA. In these healthcare facilities there is a doctor for 4.5 hours a day and 9 nurses together with 6 full-time social and health workers. Again according to the Agenas plan, the annual cost for staff for each community hospital, with an average of 20 beds, is estimated at around 600 thousand euros.
An ambitious plan, but above all necessary to fill, if not completely at least in large part, those shortcomings that emerged clearly in this pandemic year. A plan that does not allow for delays. “We are already working to analyze the needs and survey the availability of buildings, evaluate possible renovations,” explains the commissioner Luigi Icardi. The time to identify the locations where to place the new structures and present the projects is not long. Everything must be ready by the end of the year. And then you will have to continue respecting the schedule, otherwise, instead of being covered by the NRP, those expenses will become new debts.
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