“Health management and medical assistance are provided by the Provincial Health Services Company in the context of public companies for personal services (APSP)”. The revolution in assistance for the elderly in the nursing home is contained in a few lines, in the form of an amendment to the budget adjustment bill.
A few lines read on Tuesday morning by the governor Maurizio Fugatti in commission that weigh like boulders on the management of the rsa and their autonomy. The President of the Province links the proposal to the problems that emerged with the Covid emergency and explains that he wants to aim for a greater involvement of the Company’s health personnel also in the future perspective of the prevention and control of infectious risk, adding that the burdens will in any case be charged to public health. But the initiative immediately provoked the uprising by the managing bodies and political opposition in the provincial council.
The ex-governor Ugo Rossi’s words were very harsh: “In the emergency phase they abandoned the rsa without any assistance and now suddenly they want to take away skills and health management”. Paola Demagri, as Rossi’s adviser to Patt, was in the past president of the nursing home in Cles, therefore she knows very well what is at stake. “They are taking away the autonomy of the APSP and dismantling a system, precisely in a moment of serious financial difficulty also”.
At 54 provincial Apsp, autonomous management of the guests’ health care is guaranteed. The doctor is usually chosen by the individual board of directors and is sometimes hired as a medical director; in some cases, the collaboration of several general practitioners who dedicate part of their working time to the nursing home is also used. There are directives to be met and standards to be followed, such as the average assistance time which must be at least 2 and a half minutes per day per guest, but the choice of professionalism to be used is exclusively for the individual company. The provincial health authority has today only a task of monitoring procedures and protocols.
«In my experience as president – Demagri explains – I have never witnessed ingenerences. Now with this centralization of skills I fear that we want to shift the responsibilities from the Department to the Healthcare Company ». The Patt councilor underlines how this blitz occurs in a particularly delicate moment for the APSP, still in difficulty in providing services usually guaranteed by day centers, semi isolated for the limitations imposed on visits to guests and many of which are intended to close the negative balance sheets due to the many beds cut with the new rules of spacing and isolation of coronavirus positives; in this regard, it announces the presentation of amendments providing for extraordinary appropriations.
Tough also the comment by Paolo Ghezzi, of Futura, who accuses the junta of wanting to appropriate the skills of the bodies with which it is difficult to relate: «The blame against the RSA, who paid the highest cost of human lives the emergency of the pandemic, – he says – we remember it well: the strategic and organizational errors of the health system have been brazenly reversed on the directions of the rsa. The answer to a need to rethink the system cannot be that of a coup d’état made with an amendment by Fugatti in committee, with the aim of making the APSP structures only health and not autonomous at all ». Giorgio Tonini said he was appalled at how the amendment was written and asked to suspend the vote for technical explanations. Perplexities also came from the majority with Claudio Cia, who shares the danger of distorting the APSP, and with Mattia Gottardi who hypothesized a different formulation of the rule.
But yesterday the amendment and the entire bill were approved in committee by the majority. Against the Rossi (Patt), Tonini (Pd) and Ghezzi (Futura) amendments. Abstained Alex Marini (mixed).
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