Presented Thursday 27 June the plan to contain waiting times at the Imola Local Health Authority. The press conference was attended by the general, health and welfare directors, Dr. Andrea Rossi, Dr. Andrea Neri and Dr. Sabrina Gabrielli, the sole person responsible for access Dr. Paola dal Pozzo and Dr. Lucia Adele Zarabini of the hospital medical directorate.
As is known, the Emilia-Romagna Region has made thirty million euros available to reduce waiting lists across the entire regional territory starting from 2024. And to ensure, again in the year, one million more services, increasing the number of visits and diagnostic tests monitored by the regional waiting list governance plan is 20%.
An extraordinary plan desired by the Regional Council which each company has developed locally, but strictly following the principles of DGR 620/24.
Increased offer and simplification
The first point concerns the satisfaction of the needs of the territory through an extraordinary production plan, i.e. an increase in the offer, but also through a simplification of the same and the guarantee of bookability, at CUP, of the services. Continuous opening of agendas and, where an immediate response is not possible, taking charge of the booking in the so-called Prelistswhere the unresolved responses are recorded and disposed of in chronological order, to relieve the citizen from the burden of contacting the booking services again.
Pre-lists and performances
The Local Health Authority of Imola has foreseen this at the moment a prelist, already active, for 6 performances: pain relief visit priority B, physiatric visit priority B, nephrology visit priority B; gastroscopy and colonoscopy diagnostics with priority D and diabetology visit with priority D. For all other services, the pre-list will be activated exceptionally, if there is no availability of booking.
Prescriptions
Appointment-based care, therefore, but also, and this is the second pillar of the plan, the prescriptive care of the specialist, required to directly prescribe in-depth and diagnostic completions, check-ups, follow-ups, therapies, etc. and the care-related care, both by general practitioners and specialists and, in particular for chronic patients, by both these professionals who must be able to co-manage the patient, in the near future also with the support of telemedicine systems.
Health consumerism
The third element is that of appropriateness, a guarantee of fairness of the public health service: the right service must be guaranteed, to the right person, in the right time.
Health consumerism of unnecessary, and sometimes harmful, services takes away resources for actual health needs and for maintaining adequate waiting times for real health needs.
For this reason, appropriate prescription protocols have been and will be developed and shared to facilitate physician adherence to the rules and prescription profiles defined by scientific literature and diagnostic-therapeutic pathways, and systems will be activated to incentivize appropriate prescriptions. ICT support is also essential, providing aids to prescriptions, conditioned pathways and appropriateness monitoring.
The production plan of the Imola Local Health Authority
Going into the specifics of the Imola Local Health Authority, the 2024 specialist production plan includes an increase in the offer of 18% for visits and 14% for diagnostics, for a total of 311,350 services and for an economic value of over 1 million euros, from regional funding (details in the attached slides).
20% of the increase is guaranteed by the increase in staff, 7% by additional services that the Company purchases from its own freelance professionals (the so-called similalp), 73% is purchased from an accredited private individual.
