Bridge of the Immaculate Conception in the name of chaos in the emergency rooms of Roma e Lazio. «Every day we are almost at a thousand people waiting for a bed to be hospitalized in the wards. Which means that the accesses are more than double – says Giulio Ricciuto, regional president of Simeu, the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine – If you exceed the ceiling of a thousand, the Goddess system jumps ». Influenza, Covid, a higher than the seasonal average number of pathologies that have become gangrenous, because during the pandemic there was no prevention: the result, only yesterday afternoon in the hospitals of Rome and Lazio there were 931 people, waiting (and for hours ) to be moved to the medical wards after the first assistance in the Goddess. Greater crowding, in the capital, at Umberto I, at Gemelli, at Pertini, at Sant’Andrea or at San Camillo. In less serious cases, even 10 hours passed between acceptance at the triage and the first visit.
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It is above all the first peak of the flu season that fills hospital emergency rooms. There are almost one hundred thousand citizens in Lazio who fall ill every week, with a prevalence among the youngest (according to the “sentinel doctors” in 37.68 percent of total cases). So far in Lazio, almost one million people have been vaccinated against the flu: 70 percent of the elderly have been immunized, but the percentage numbers are much lower among the under 14s (only 90,000 vaccinated). Health authorities fear that cases could skyrocket in January, resulting in an unsustainable increase in hospital admissions. «Which are already too many at this stage given our staff – adds Ricciuto – By now, with 600 doctors on the staff out of the thousand needed, we have come to cancel “communication time”: either we treat patients or we talk to their relatives “.
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It’s not just the flu that undermines the Goddess system. In some respects, Covid creates more problems: yesterday in Rome and Lazio there were 2,371 new cases, 1,162 in Rome alone, and 786 hospitalized. Less worrying numbers compared to the times of the pandemic, except that many infected take the rapid test at home and do not communicate their conditions to the local health authorities. Today, then, there is no longer a network of beds dedicated to Coronavirus patients, with the result that it becomes more difficult for hospital health management to find where to put them.
The combination of Covid-flu also increases the pressure on the studies of general practitioners and those of paediatricians, who from January will return to charging their clients for tampons. “And for us it is a fundamental tool for understanding what our patients are suffering from,” says Alberto Chiriatti, regional deputy secretary of the Fimmg trade union. In Lazio there are more and more cases in which the local health authorities ask family doctors to take charge of more people, exceeding the ceiling of 1,500: reaching 1,800. Antonio Maggi, president of the Order of Doctors of Rome, asks the local health authorities to speed up “the assignment of tasks: in a short time there could be at least 100 more doctors in service”.
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