Thus Covid has lengthened the waiting lists: in Sardinia times more than tripled for an electrocardiogram

Covid has brought healthcare to its knees throughout Italy, dramatically lengthening waiting lists. And Sardinia is among the regions most affected.

This is what emerges from the report 'Hi - Healthcare Insights, the Observatory on Access to Care', presented today in Rome by The Bridge Foundation.

Waiting times for an electrocardiogram more than tripled on the island in 2021, the first year after the outbreak of the Covid emergency: if they were on average 15 days, they have become as many as 52. waiting for an eye examination, which went from an average of 23 days in 2020 to 56 in 2021. Umbria is also bad, going from 15 to 33 days.

On a first gynecological visit, the Autonomous Province of Trento and Abruzzo respectively have the lowest average number of waiting days and the highest percentage of services performed on time; Molise and Basilicata, on the other hand, stand out in the negative, with respectively 58% of services performed on time and an average of 42 days of waiting. On the other hand, the Sardinian data is average.

The Foundation also highlighted problems in retrieving data, ranking the latter in which the Island is the rear among the twenty Italian regions, with a score of 18, significantly worse than 23 in 2020. A score that has been assigned based on three parameters: accessibility, ease of finding the requested data; usability, i.e. the possibility or not of fully understanding the information that can be viewed; the completeness with respect to the quality and quantity of the data collected by the Regions.

«It is not enough to provide through a law that the data on waiting lists must be made public, but it is necessary - comments Alessandro Venturi, scientific director of the Hi Observatory and Vice President of The Bridge Foundation - that there is a political responsibility that implements that law . If the data is missing, the information is missing and knowledge is not generated, consequently it becomes difficult to keep a complex body like our health system on its feet".

(Unioneonline/L)