La Corte dei Conti da ragione al Nursing Up. 747.000 ricoveri in meno.

The Court of Auditors sides with our President Dr. Antonio De Palma who states:
We note, with great bitterness, and we are certainly not satisfied, that our predictions have been confirmed by the recent data from the Court of Auditors: during Covid, the burden of admissions to intensive care units and the difficult situations of emergency rooms, every day at the limit, also linked to the chronic shortage of staff, acted as a boomerang on ordinary healthcare and outpatient care.

The Court of Auditors highlights in its report that as many as 747,000 fewer hospitalizations were recorded in non-Covid areas, and moreover, as many as 145 million fewer outpatient services, outlining the bleak picture of Italian healthcare with many critical issues, whose shortcomings have been laid bare by a virus that forced the already scarce energies to focus on infected patients, closing ward after ward, also due to that sad peak of 80-85 thousand nurses missing from the SSN alone.

In all this, it is clear that, outside the hospital setting, we desperately needed that family nurse project, the one that the Government first promoted with great fanfare, even going so far as to promote an ad hoc law, and then allowed it to be implemented only minimally.

We loudly requested, with repeated appeals unfortunately unheard, to the Government and the Conference of Regions, that after the approval of the law for the hiring of family nurses, the approximately 9,600 professional units provided for by the new regulations, already too few in themselves, be immediately included on a permanent basis in local healthcare settings, to best cope, with concrete support for local healthcare that has been feverish for some time, with the explosion of hospitalizations, in the midst of the pandemic emergency.

None of this happened, the Government and the Regions once again showed “short arms” at the most important moment.

The data from the Court of Auditors are overwhelming and show that we are walking, indeed running, against traffic, on a highway, in a vehicle with faulty brakes.

Yet there are still opportunities, even today, to remedy the disastrous actions of the recent past. Family nurses, now more than ever, must be widely introduced, from north to south, with a solid plan to relaunch local healthcare.

The new PNRR of the Draghi Government, the long-awaited National Recovery and Resilience Plan, should give impetus, this is our hope, to a concrete reform of local healthcare, an essential leap in quality to be implemented, in light of a significant increase in resources, with the allocation for home care officially rising to 4 billion euros.

We are facing an opportunity not to be missed for the future of our Health System: now that there are finally more funds available, Government and Regions must walk hand in hand and immediately plan a strategic plan that translates into a relaunch mission that cannot and must not know any hesitation of any kind.

The Family Nurse, we repeat, in light of the new National Recovery and Resilience Plan, is a unique opportunity. Now we expect ideas, initiatives, facts: and not just the politics of good intentions.

It is the Government's duty to plan actions in harmony with regional realities, now it is inevitable, there are no more second chances.

A national agreement is needed for the family nurse. It would be unimaginable to have a contract similar to that of SSN employees, which is certainly not functional for the activities that this role will carry out.

And if on the one hand, nursing homes and private facilities desperately need employed nurses, on the other hand, widespread hiring is also needed in public healthcare, in a linear strategic plan that provides for the strengthening of hospital facilities, the support of private ones increasingly in need of oxygen, offering in all this to Italian healthcare the key figure of the family nurse, who with his/her professionalism will streamline hospitalizations, will offer support to citizens in need of assistance and care, and will finally guarantee prevention in schools.