Half of the special units that must guarantee home care for Covid patients have been activated. A few hundred family nurses hired out of the 9,600 expected in May by the Relaunch decree
by Marzio Bartoloni
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Half of the special units that must guarantee home care for Covid patients have been activated. A few hundred family nurses hired out of the 9,600 expected in May by the Relaunch decree
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After the trench of hospitals and precious ICU beds, home care was the other thorn in the side of the first wave, but 8 months after the emergency it seems that the lesson has not yet been learned. There are still missing in various Regions and in the expected numbers – only half of them would have been activated – the Usca, the special assistance continuity units born with the task of following suspected or full-blown cases of Covid-19 directly at home.
The operation to hire 9,600 family nurses was even more unsuccessful, foreseen in May in the Relaunch decree which allocated almost 1 billion for 2020 and 2021. These new hires were to strengthen the territory by becoming a new reference figure for families, to starting from the Covid emergency. But at the moment no more than a few hundred would have been hired in a group of Regions.
Assistance in home isolation
On October 16, Covid patients at home in home isolation exceeded 100 thousand (100,496) and for them the days in many cases are finally marked by the waiting for a phone call from the ASL to decide on a tampon or monitor their health. There is little or nothing else, starting precisely from the special assistance continuity units, the infamous Usca, micro-teams composed of 4-5 doctors and nurses equipped with all the protections and imagined in the middle of the emergency last March to provide first aid by knocking on the home of Covid patients.
There is no official and recent monitoring of how many Usca there are, even if before the summer the number was about 600 in total activated in 15 Regions (Abruzzo, Basilicata, Emilia Romagna, Campania, Liguria, Lombardy, Marche, Piedmont, Valle d’Aosta, Sicily, Tuscany, Veneto, Lazio, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Calabria). A low number, about half of what the Health decree (14/2020) had foreseen, issued in a hurry in March by the Government and wanted by the Health Minister Roberto Speranza to try to stem the first wave.
That decree had allocated the funds and established that each Regions put on the track one Usca for every 50 thousand inhabitants – therefore in all 1,200 – within a month and therefore by last April. But these special units started late, including hiring young doctors on a fixed-term basis in addition to continuity doctors. Among other things, in the Relaunch decree of last May another 60 million were allocated to strengthen the Usca, but there have been no new activations since then.
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