Chaos Ruggi: in Salerno the system is down and no visits to Orthopedics

“If you think it best, you can also go away and go to another hospital.” It’s not so much the painful twinges in his back or even the weight of having to sit for at least two hours on a wooden chair – despite the discomfort in his lumbar area – that really hurt Ivan Petrosino. What really hurt were the words he heard repeated in the Orthopedics department of the “Ruggi” hospital in Salerno where he had arrived following an initial visit to the Emergency Room on Via San Leonardo.
In the last few hours, in fact, carrying out the requested tests has been impossible: in fact, after the transfers, no one from the emergency-urgency area informed the patients that the computer system in the department had completely crashed. A short circuit that meant that the patients were still diverted to the floor where the medical staff, however, was not able to carry out any examination and, above all, the doctors were not able to request any type of examination, even the most trivial one such as a blood sample.
For hours, therefore, a little girl with a wrist bandaged as best she could, an elderly lady and two boys on a stretcher who had been in a car accident waited in front of the doctor’s room. Mr. Petrosino, impatient after hours of waiting and shocked by the response he received, decided to sign, leave and turn to a private facility. “I had the possibility of leaving and above all the financial means to bypass the hospital. But I ask myself: what happens to a poor devil who does not have the same possibilities as me? What I have suffered and witnessed is shameful, I have a strong suspicion that there was a failure to provide assistance because this admission of impotence in front of patients is a very serious matter. Among other things, it is not clear how it is possible that no one in the emergency room considered the problem of preventing patients from needlessly going to another department.”

Eleonora German

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