Sit in the square of the doctors and nurses Emergency room: “So we can’t take it anymore”

The doctors of the Italian emergency room in sit-in in Rome against the “impoverishment” of the National Health Service, which is “losing one of its fundamental pillars: the structures that guarantee first aid and treatment in emergency and urgency”. This is the alarm raised by Simeu, the Italian Society of Emergency-Urgency Medicine. In Italy in 2019 “there were a total of 24 million accesses to the emergency room, roughly an emergency every 90 seconds. Today not only do they not decrease, but they increase. In 2021 the performances worsen because the response capacities are reduced ”, recalled the scientific society. “Today 4,000 doctors are missing, representing about 30% of the organic structure necessary to make the emergency rooms function properly and this is not just a number that impresses for its size”, warns Simeu. “We do not know how we will be able to face the winter – highlights Andrea Fabbri, head of the Simeu Study and Research Center – Only in the last two years, since the beginning of the pandemic, have we suffered a total net loss of about 2,000 doctors. In reality, the depletion of first aid staff is traveling – according to the survey that we have just completed in these days – at an even faster rate: about 2000 doctors in the last year alone. These numbers tell us that every two professionals who drop out we find a replacement for only one of them. We now live in a perennial state of alert and every day is worse than the previous one ».

Simeu has raised the alarm about the serious difficulties of the structures that guarantee emergency and urgent relief and treatment. The doctors and nurses took to the streets today in Rome in Piazza Santi Apostoli, “united by skills and passion, they want to raise awareness among citizens and decision-makers on the dramatic crisis that looms over our business – said the national president Simeu, Salvatore Manca – the Our message is dramatically banal: without an effective urgent emergency, without a structured first aid service that is up to the real needs, there cannot be an efficient National Health Service. We speak with good reason, because despite the shortcomings we continue to keep the services running. But we got to the bottom ». «The profound discomfort experienced by Emergency Urgency professionals coincides with the unacceptable conditions in which patients in many emergency rooms find themselves. Doctors, nurses and patients pay the price for the same shortcomings, between endless waits for a bed, inadequate structures and the difficulties related to numerically insufficient staff – explained Fabio De Iaco, head of the Academy of Directors Simeu – Doctors and nurses of the emergency urgency have been treated with ‘indifference’ for too long, despite the tremendous psycho-physical load they sustain, for a professional commitment that is unmatched in the NHS. We would like to be perceived for what we are: by professionals as colleagues, by institutions as technical interlocutors, by citizens as defenders of patients’ rights “.