Italians are increasingly aging, and the demand for care and assistance is increasing. However, hospitals are struggling to provide beds in internal medicine departments , which are best suited to treating the conditions of older patients. Sardinia, along with Calabria and Sicily, has the worst situation among the regions.
This is what emerges from a new survey by the Federation of Associations of Hospital Internship Managers (FADOI), conducted on 269 hospital departments.
Nationally, 77% of hospitalized patients are over 70 years old and have more than four comorbid chronic conditions. However, the internal medicine departments that are supposed to admit them are short on average one doctor and one nurse in five, half of the departments are overbooked (i.e., overcrowding forces emergency solutions), and two out of three patients pay the price of boarding (extended stays) in emergency rooms, spending hours, if not days, on stretchers waiting for a bed that isn't available.
Looking at the regional data released by Fadoi, Sardinia recorded 83% overbooking and a similar percentage for boarding. These numbers are among the worst, along with Calabria (which has 100% in both categories) and Sicily (78% overbooking, 94% boarding).
The best situation is recorded in Tuscany, which has an overbooking of 17% and a boarding rate of 61%).
"In Italy," Fadoi explains, "internal medicine departments are increasingly overbooked due to a shortage of beds, staff, and technological equipment. This is due to their outdated classification as 'low-intensity care' departments, when the current reality is that, precisely because of their age and the presence of multiple comorbidities, more than half of internal medicine patients (50.9%) actually require medium-to-high-intensity care.
However, being considered as having low intensity care means having the right to less staff, a smaller number of beds and equipment, and this – warns Fadoi – inevitably implies
