Every patient waiting in the emergency room to be transferred to a hospital bed causes a delay of at least 12 minutes on subsequent visits, also increasing mortality up to 4.5%. This translates into hours of delays with emergency rooms filled with dozens of people waiting for admission.

An explosive situation, reports Alessandro Riccardi, new president of Simeu (the company that represents emergency and urgency doctors), which confirms the growing tensions in these holidays, when the emergency room becomes the only lifeline for many patients who cannot find assistance in the area.

In essence, explains Riccardi, a delay is created in the entire assistance chain, with a worsening not only of the assistance but of the health of the patient himself: «During the holidays the situation is always critical, a sign of a constant problem regarding the aggressiveness of the users».

"We can't find places in the departments, and it's clear that those who need assistance are in difficulty, with inadequate assistance," he explains. Patients remain in often improvised areas waiting for transport to the department of definitive assignment. In the presence of the phenomenon called "boarding" of patients waiting in the Emergency Room to be admitted, numerous studies document an unjustified lengthening of waiting times for medical visits, a marked difficulty in managing the pathways of all other patients, an increase in disease complications both for cases that will be hospitalized and for those who at the end of observation will be discharged home.

Further statistical associations, also published on the Simeu website, demonstrate the link between a greater number of days of hospitalization and a greater incidence of complications. In a recent study it was shown that the mortality of patients waiting for hospitalization increased from 2.5% to 4.5% in cases where the boarding time exceeded 12 hours.

At the moment, the interventions implemented to ease the pressure on the structures and the difficulties of the operators seem far from being decisive. "They are still not sufficient and adequate even if there have been signs of attention towards our work. In the meantime, professionals are leaving, not because of burnout: we are used to managing stress. We do it because we can no longer bear to see certain situations such as the loss of dignity of the patient. You can't get used to this situation", he concludes.