a year for a mammogram. The map of all performances

ANCONA New year, same story. Despite the resources used to eliminate them – 9 million euros in 2023 alone – even in 2024, waiting lists will remain a thorn in the side of healthcare. In the Marche as in the rest of Italy. Recovering the setback in performance during the dark two-year period of Covid is not a simple task and takes time. But health doesn’t wait. And if it takes more than a year to get a mammogram, the problem requires a short-term solution.

It’s worse for women

From the monitoring of the regional health agency updated in January, it emerges that the Marche region is not a health system for women: mammograms and breast ultrasounds record the worst results – in terms of waiting times – among all the services of the Pngla (the national plan for management of waiting lists). The cold numbers speak for themselves: for a bilateral mammogram the average waiting time recorded in January is 63 days for priority class B which should instead be guaranteed within 10 days. Things are no better in the case of priority D (deferrable) to be paid in 60 days maximum: instead we are at 138. And it is an average, so it means that there are also those who wait longer. As for the scheduled ones, we arrive at 339.6 days of waiting.

The borderline cases

Let’s move on to unilateral mammography: average wait of 157 days for D priority services and 226.6 days for P priorities. Do we want to talk about bilateral breast ultrasound? For B priorities, instead of 10 days the wait is 39.3 days; for the Ds 116.2 days and for the Ps it is close to 311 days. The first visits also struggle, especially those with priority B: for a vascular surgery visit, the average waiting time is 18.4 days, for an endocrinology visit 22.5 days. With neurological visits we go up to 19.1 days and with ophthalmology visits to 19.9 days. But the negative trend is also recorded in operating theatres, as demonstrated by the monitoring of the Marche University Hospital. The analysis on the first quarter of 2024 concerns the waiting times for Class A hospitalizations, i.e. those to be guaranteed within 30 days for clinical cases that «can potentially worsen rapidly to the point of becoming emergent or in any case causing serious damage to the prognosis », explains the Ministry of Health. However, it emerges that out of 95 total surgical interventions for malignant breast cancer, just 11 were performed at the right time, therefore only 11.5%. The data on surgical interventions for malignant prostate cancer is also highly negative: of the 14 total in the first quarter of 2024, only two hospitalizations were guaranteed within the threshold (14.2%).

The surgical front

Percentages that improve in surgical interventions for lung cancer: we are at 44.4%, with hospitalization times centered in 12 out of 27 cases. However, the result in surgical interventions for melanoma is good: four out of five performed on time. Now, it must be said that, as the governor Francesco Acquaroli recently recalled, the demand for healthcare services in the first three months of 2024 grew by 65%. «All those services that were not asked of the system in the Covid years are now arriving en masse, creating a bottleneck», is the analysis of the number one at Palazzo Raffaello. No one has a magic wand to solve a problem of this magnitude. But the stalemate cannot last much longer. The health of the people of the Marche region is at stake.

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