«A waste of 390 million»

Superfluous hospitalizations and a blow to the coffers of the Puglia Region. Patients end up in hospital, but in many cases they don’t need it at all. And so there is a risk of overwhelming the departments, sending the service into a tailspin and wasting public resources to assist people who should instead be treated in a completely different way. Every year in Puglia there are 130 thousand hospitalizations that could be avoided if there were correct management of patients by local services. An error that leads to a waste of almost 390 million euros for the regional coffers. This is one of the data contained in the report produced by the Federation of hospital internal medicine doctors (Fadoi) from which it also emerged that in Puglia 15% of hospitalizations are improper because the patient who arrives in the ward could have been treated at home cared for by family members, or by those who provide home care. According to research, there is often a lack of communication between hospital doctors and general practitioners who speak to each other in only 14% of cases. A lack of communication that for only 7% of doctors can be resolved by the creation of hospitals and community homes to which seven billion euros of the Pnrr are directed.

The report

In almost half of the Apulian hospitals, 40% of hospitalizations are caused by the failure of local services to take care of which for 33% of Apulian hospital internal medicine doctors could be resolved with a greater offer of integrated home care while for 7% a more continuous opening of family doctors’ offices would be necessary, as they only update their health records in 14% of cases. The lack of updating means that in eight out of ten cases patients arrive at the ward without anything being known about their health history. Hospitals and community homes, included in the health reform, will not be able to avoid hospitalizations and improper access to emergency rooms for 30% of interns, while for 49% of them a provision is needed capable of providing precise indications on which local professionals and how they should work in the new structures. «In the face of a greater demand for healthcare, a remodulation of the healthcare offering is necessary to respond to the new needs of the population», declares Anna Belfiore, president of Fadoi Puglia, convinced that «the most economically sustainable model is that of home care with recourse to hospitalization only in the acute phases of a specific pathology”.

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