The antechamber for the stretchers is packed, there isn’t a free place. Thus, the stretchers are placed in the side corridors, even on two rows in the ambulance triage room, while the automatic door leading to the outside opens and closes continuously.
It’s midnight and the Careggi emergency room explodes: they are 24 stretchers arranged haphazardlyinstead, dozens of patients are waiting on chairs.
All still waiting for a late visit: for a green code – a deferrable urgency, but still an urgency – we need it seven and a half hours to finally see a doctor: from half past four in the afternoon to midnight.
But the cost of an exhausting wait can be felt right from the start: for those who arrive at the emergency room on their own feet and don’t go through the ambulance triage, it takes more than half an hour for the nursing assessment that establishes the code only of priority.
In the aisles
However, there are no protests in the emergency room wards. The patients snort and complain, but the tones are muffled: in front of them, the few nurses run madly and despite everything they try to have kind words.
A patient who has just been placed on a stretcher says he can wait, “I understand the situation”, the nurse smiles at him. “I can’t take it anymore, we can’t go on like this”, exclaims a healthcare worker who sees an ambulance appearing and carrying an elderly woman with heart failure. It’s an outburst aimed at himself, he seems on the verge of wanting to give up everything, but as he starts talking to the patients again his tones become courteous again. And also yesterday, April 30th at four in the afternoon, there were patients in Careggi’s emergency room 128, of which 44 awaiting examination.
It’s a lose-lose battle for everyone.
Long waits and staff under siege
On the walls there are posters with the face of a nurse with a swollen eye: «Stop attacks on healthcare workers», it says. Sometimes long waits exacerbate frustrations, those who are ill demand attention.
But faced with staff under siege, who don’t even have the right to a break, it becomes difficult to even raise their voice. In reality, it was a health worker who did it, once, in response to an elderly woman who complained: «If only those who really need it came herethere would be no problems,” he shouts.
But he is also wrong in substance, many patients have no alternatives. One of them arrived due to heavy bleeding: “I called the medical guard, she told me that I absolutely had to come here.”
After two hours of waiting, the nurses give him a blood gas analysis, the response is comforting, the hemoglobin levels are good. So he turns to triage, giving up the visit: «I sign to leave, if the EGA is good I can call my doctor tomorrow morning, the wait would be the same and at least I sleep in my bed. This way I will also make your work easier.”
In the response of a health worker there is the synthesis of the crisis of the system and the void of the local health system (including an on-call doctor who does not have the possibility of carrying out a test which is carried out in the emergency room by nurses): “Thank you”.
The Tuscan healthcare situation
To think that Tuscany – these are the numbers from the latest Agenas report – is among the regions at the top nationally for emergency room efficiency. Alone just over 10% of accesses it is inappropriate compared to a national average of 22%, a sign that the territory’s filter is still better than elsewhere.
But one in three Tuscans still went to the emergency room at least once last year, a sign that remains the fundamental safeguard of the healthcare system.
Waiting times are also among the best in Italy, and this, by the Region’s own admission, «thanks to the extraordinary commitment of the professionals of the public health system who in recent years have experienced significant pressure, with a significant shortage of personnel ».
