For a colonoscopy the patients are diverted to Cagliari For many services the lists are not bookable
by Luigi Soriga
February 15, 2021
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SASSARI. Non-Covid healthcare seems to have become optional. Specialist and outpatient services, in the public sector, are distributed slowly, and all that flow of daily visits, examinations, prevention is completely flooded. The health receipt will arrive in several months, when that avalanche of neglected and undiagnosed pathologies in the initial phase will spill over to hospitals in all its gravity. Only the private structures in agreement have resumed providing services at full capacity, but the budgets are too limited and cover a minimal part of the requests.
The litmus test for this disaster is, as usual, the Single Reservation Center. That is the filter between health care and citizens. If a patient needs to check their health, their needs must deal with the agendas of the Cup. In this phase a wide range of diagnostic tests and visits, at least in the province of Sassari, is completely unavailable. Just try to book a colonoscopy, which is an extremely common, invasive and decisive exam for the early diagnosis of tumors. The Sassari Cup is able to make an appointment shortly only on the other end of the island, that is, in one of the affiliated clinics in Cagliari, because everything is blocked in northern Sardinia. On 9 March there would be a free space in Bosa, on 29 March in Tempio, and then in June in Isili. «I, who have already undergone this type of examination – explains a patient – know very well that doing it 300 kilometers away is madness. Because to undergo such an invasive procedure, you need a delicate preparation, done two days before, which does not allow you to tolerate journeys of hours. Furthermore, you must show up in the facility with the swab performed and with negative results, and this task is also difficult to reconcile with a trip. Is it possible that those who govern health care do not put themselves in the shoes of us patients? ».
Then, of course, there is all that range of critical exams, from a red circle even pre-pandemic, which with the Covid emergency have completely skipped. We are talking about services classified as “planned”, that is, not to be carried out in an emergency regime (for this type the response times must be very different). For example, a complete CT scan of the abdomen. The receptionist of the Cup is currently unable to assign a date, because the system is armored with the words “In planning”. It means that hospitals, clinics and private centers in Sassari cannot make their own agendas available to users.
Another example: MRI of the brain and brainstem. The response is still “To be planned”. And again: “Endocrinological visit”. Nothing to do in Sassari, the status is “in planning”.
As for the cardiological examination plus ECG, the first available place is in Alghero on April 14, then in Ittiri on April 23 and finally at Conti on May 4. Long times even for eye examinations, all blocked for the usual mammograms. There is still a large portion of the backlog to be recovered, namely the visits scheduled and skipped during the critical phase of the pandemic. But public health, at the moment, seems very far from wanting to catch up.
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