Muravera: 118 doctor at work for 18 hours straight
It is the second case in the town of Sarrabus: and after the 18-hour shift, he had no one to replace him. Blame for Covid and the cuts
He volunteered to cover the shift of a colleague who tested positive at Covid but, after being on duty for eighteen hours, no one was found to take his place. New disturbing alarm signal on the health of the health service from Muravera. Once again it's up to a doctor, once again the intervention of the carabinieri is requested. If about ten days ago the news of a doctor from the hospital had made the rounds of Italy, this time it's up to a doctor from 118, one of the three in actual service on an organic plant that includes six (and there are many) were when the system, about twenty years ago, was started).
Of those three, in recent days, one tested positive at Covid: to guarantee the service, colleagues took on the workload of the forced absence. One of the two finished his 18-hour shift yesterday morning at 8 but despite the emergency was communicated in time, no doctor was found to relieve him at least until 20 yesterday evening, when the emergency would have begun. his next shift. What to do? Service order: the doctor had to go home. Which he did, but only after notifying the superiors, the mayor and the carabinieri that only nurses would remain to guarantee the 118 service until 8pm.
Lidia Todde, 65, of which the last 25, shakes her head first by founding a spontaneous committee and then by setting up (in 2000) the association “Obiettivo Sanità Sardegna”, to fight for the strengthening of the Sarrabus health services. And mainly of the San Marcellino di Muravera hospital, the target of a sequence of political choices that, this combative retiree swears, have transformed the hospital into a beautiful, new and functional, but inexorably empty box.
«Once the San Marcellino worked. There was otolaryngology, orthopedics, surgery, obstetrics-gynecology ». Many of those departments are still indicated on the totem with the indications positioned in the courtyard, but inside, behind the doors, brand new departments open up (the renovation was 12 years ago, at the time of the Cappellacci Giunta, but the appropriations were of the Giunta Soru, councilor for health Nerina Dirindin) but desolately empty. Even medicine is half empty: last Saturday there were nine hospitalized patients.
"I have all the history on hand," assures Todde. Ed lists: 2003, cut of the ENT department; 2006, announcement that "there were no longer the numbers" to keep obstetrics-gynecology going and that a "woman point" would be born; 2015, announcement of the Reform of the hospital network (Giunta Pigliaru, councilor Luigi Arru); March 2021, downgrading of the emergency room to the point of first intervention: the anesthetists are gone, and having no more 24-hour surgery in the hospital, only patients with white and green codes, i.e. minor pathologies, are rescued, while the yellow and red codes are diverted to Cagliari.
The news, a couple of weeks ago, had launched a new alarm: the (concrete) hypothesis that the operation of what remains of the emergency room was limited to 12 hours a day. The new general manager of ASL 8, Marcello Tidore, took care of everything to reassure everyone: "It won't happen."
But the general picture tells of a decline that seems inexorable. In his office as mayor, Salvatore Piu, who is an orthopedist by profession and is 71 years old, 23 of which spent working in the hospital of the town, where "by the will of the then president of the Mario Melis Region" he was nodding to open the Orthopedics ward, which was later suppressed.
It was also he, subsequently, who started the emergency room of the marine hospital in Cagliari, also suppressed that: "My health career could be called a failure", he jokes about it with self-irony. Piu, mayor for the third time, is far from resigned to the decline of the Sarrabus hospital. You see, let's be clear: «Are we talking about obstetrics-gynecology? My children were born here, in Muravera. To say how much I believed it. But we had dropped to eighty deliveries a year. Divided by eight obstetricians, it means that each one gave birth to ten babies a year. Two caesareans a year each. Too few to have that promptness, that reliability that comes only from the high number of interventions ". Numbers, Piu insists, count in medicine: «Which mechanic would you take to repair your car? From the one who repairs ten a year or from the one who repairs two hundred a year? " But they also count in terms of sustainability: “Citizens are calling for emergency surgery.
Marco Noce
