From waiting lists to emergency rooms, Bellantone (Cattolica): “NHS can be relaunched”

The future of healthcare is the great absentee of the electoral campaign, with so many emergencies knocking on the door of the next executive, from the long waiting lists, also the fault of the pandemic, to the chaos first aid with a ten-year shortage of specialists. “Forget the magic wand, to relaunch health care you need ideas and the ability to put them into practice”. Taking stock for Adnkronos Salute is Rocco Bellantone, dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart until November 1st. According to Bellantone, the first step is “making national healthcare more uniform: we have many regional healthcare systems and this creates a patchy situation in which there are areas with world excellence and areas in very bad shape. Waiting lists – he observes – today they are intolerable and tough measures are also needed to cut them. ” According to Bellantone, “we should have regional waiting lists that provide for the obligation for accredited public structures to have certain times dictated by a national table. to the private individual who, free of charge, can make the facilities available – suggests the principal – An agreement could also be envisaged with doctors who do private activity, to provide that 10% of their activity goes for the cutting of waiting lists as it happens in the US where lawyers have lent themselves to work ‘pro bono’. It cannot exist that a person who is ill does not have an answer from the health service “. “And for this I believe that it is necessary to entrust family doctors with the booking of examinations and admissions for their patients – he underlines – You can easily network the studies with accredited structures. In this way we also reduce the phenomenon of ‘do from tea, where people book their services themselves “. Even the intervention to improve and reverse the course of the emergency room can “provide for the involvement of family doctors”, suggests Bellantone. “I am of the idea – he explains – that every Italian hospital should have a general medicine department to simplify the work of the emergency room. In this way the doctor can follow the patient along the path, understand if there is immediate availability of hospitalization and it would avoid the clogging of the emergency departments “. One of the cornerstones of the ‘recipe save NHS’ of the dean of Medicine of the Catholic University, also director of the Clinical Government of the Policlinico Gemelli Irccs Foundation in Rome, is that of training the doctor in the patient’s bed. “The Gemelli has 1,500 beds – he points out – This allows every resident of our Faculty of Medicine to gain experience, and this should also be the case in other situations”. One of the added values ​​”that we have created at Cattolica – he recalls – is the international course also in English, which sees medical students from 40 countries around the world. This is a great enrichment for everyone”.