PISA. Emergency room, antibiotics, staff absences. These are the three “subjects” in which the University Hospital of Pisa is unable to achieve sufficient results. In fact, it gets a really bad rating, despite achieving maximum marks (or at least passing marks) on practically all the other evaluation parameters. Those monitored, year after year, by the Mes Laboratory of the Sant’Anna High School in Pisa, which represent the real report cards of local, regional but also national health.
Tuscan and Pisan primates
The survey was presented a few days ago and there is no shortage of good news at the regional and Pisan level, also underlined by the president of Tuscany himself, Eugenio Giani: «In the vast majority of indicators – said Giani – we find ourselves at the national top for the quality of care offered: our oncology and surgery comes out on top.” And he added: “We are first in continuity of care: it means that our system is well organised.” In relation to the parameters examined in Pisa, compliance with waiting times for oncological surgery, length of hospitalization (which translates into the ability to effectively manage patients and available resources), compliance with times for operations following a fracture of the femur in the over sixty-five population – just to give a few examples – obtain an evaluation, based on the data, of good if not excellent.
What’s wrong
But not everything that happens in Aoup works as it should, for variously attributable reasons – which the Sant’Anna investigation however does not call into question – and in sectors whose difficulties are often reported by the citizens themselves. At the top of the list are the difficulties encountered in the emergency room, often a “bottleneck” of dysfunctions or deficiencies in health services in the area, where the volume of activity reaches exceptional levels. So it can happen that those who go to the Cisanello emergency room, faced with the prospect of long waits (before or but also after visiting you) decide to leave everyone in the lurch and go home. During 2023, over 6 thousand patients did so out of a total of just under 89 thousand. Numbers that are not enough to reach sufficiency. And the same goes for the percentage of emergency room visits then sent to hospitalization with waiting times of less than 8 hours: too many patients – to be precise 6,131 out of 12,367 in 2023 – forced to wait longer, says the study, which puts the numbers for 2023 in line. The third “failure” concerns the consumption of antibiotics in hospital, a parameter connected to the risks linked to the abuse of these drugs which can strengthen the resistance of bacteria to treatments and therefore encourage the spread of infections nosocomial diseases that are then difficult to eradicate. In the hospital in Pisa the consumption of antibiotics is well above the standard threshold and increasing compared to the previous year, but it is not the worst performance in Tuscany (even worse data are recorded in the ASL Centro). The black shirt in Tuscany, however, belongs to the Aoup for another indicator: staff absences from the workplace (for reasons other than holidays). The Sant’Anna survey brings together the number of workable days in the year (equal to 524,540, the reference one for 2022) and the number of days of absence (106,796) and the data compared highlights not only the worst situation in Tuscany but also an increase in the trend of absences, almost double compared to the previous year.
