Emergency room forced to close for four hours with a lot of formal communication to the mayor and the prefect, all non-urgent visits and examinations suspended until a later date, waits for days for the tampon and for home care: the Novara Healthcare is in trouble in the face of the virus race, as happens in the rest of Piedmont. How did all this come about?
What happened on Thursday night in the emergency room in Novara had never happened in memory of those who have worked at the Maggiore for decades and its director, Gian Carlo Avanzi. Too many arrivals, forty patients with symptoms of contagion, including thirty in serious conditions, forced the structure to ask the management to block access with 118 ambulances. It was 7 pm, it reopened at midnight after it was cleared. and moved a ward to accommodate new Covid patients.
Yet it shouldn’t have happened that way. Immediately after the spring emergency there was talk of a plan by the Region that would define Covid facilities to keep hub hospitals, such as Maggiore, which provide highly specialized services to a vast territory, “clean” from hospitalizations of infected with the virus . But the July program identified Covid hospitals for Turin, Cuneo and Alessandria while postponing the decision to a time of need for Eastern Piedmont. Only in mid-October did the Region identify Coronavirus as the principals: Borgosesia for less serious cases, Vercelli for the most important ones, then Borgomanero and then Novara. Maybe it was already too late. And in any case, the plan has never been applied despite authoritative interventions such as that of the mayor of Novara, Alessandro Canelli, who has spent himself in the Region, and of the Province of Novara. And despite the repeated requests for clarity from the minority. “There is no one who really decides, the regional department has five different contacts: so it is impossible to act in a timely manner – comments the regional councilor Domenico Rossi -. When the numbers of infections began to rise, Borgosesia did not yet have the necessary equipment and personnel and Novara found itself unprepared for the second wave, chasing the emergency ».
Lacks staff
Meanwhile, medicine in the area pays for years of scarce investments as a system: we need real home care that allows less serious patients to be discharged and treated at home, without clogging hospitals. Usca del Novarese units are growing now with the difficulty of finding personnel. After all, until a few days ago, the Piedmont Region only proposed six-month contracts against other areas of Italy that promised more significant stabilization: “We witnessed – the trade unions of Cgil, Cisl and Uil from Piedmont – declared in a document a series of serious programmatic deficiencies on the part of the Region ».
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