Like every year, as summer approaches, the alarm comes from patients who often have problems using the nephrology and dialysis centers in Sardinia due to "major shortages of medical and nursing personnel" and the absence of "a special holiday dialysis project that becomes fully operational".
The situation is explained by Bruno Denotti and Annibale Zucca , president and secretary of Asned Sardegna, a national hemodialysis association which is now asking for an intervention by the Region.
«To date, more than a hundred requests for help have arrived at the Asnet headquarters from those patients who, wishing to spend a holiday period on the island, have been denied a place by the dialysis center contacted. Many of these, even in the face of the request for availability to be able to undergo dialysis treatment during the holiday, have not even received an answer".
«Behind this situation there is the serious shortage of staff in the Sardinian health system which does not even spare nephropaths. A lack that in the summer, with the arrival of holidays also for workers in the health sector, becomes even more alarming and against which the provision of additional services for doctors and nurses has had no effect, making the activation of the so-called "holiday dialysis projects", which this year the Region has not even foreseen».
«There are numerous requests that our association receives every day, especially in this period, from dialysis patients who ask for our intervention to guarantee the possibility of a dialysis place - underlines Denotti -, as the structures contacted give evasive answers (when they give) and few certainties. It is sad to note that our Region, despite professing to have a ''tourist vocation'', is still unable to offer an adequate planning of the service, capable of responding to the numerous requests that arrive not only from the peninsula and from residents , but also by tourists from abroad».
«It is obviously the patients who pay the price - adds Zucca - who unfortunately will not be able to arrive in Sardinia, except thanks to those few dialysis centers that have given their willingness to include them, in shifts intended for the patients in care '' stable''. Our Constitution guarantees everyone the right to health, but evidently not to those who unfortunately turn out to be attached to a car in order to continue living . Our task, as associations born to protect the rights and interests of this particular category of citizens, is to give our widest availability in finding solutions in order to do justice to hemodialysis patients".
Nor is the situation of Sardinian dialysis patients satisfactory: «1,500 people who, to undergo therapy, refer to one of the 35 dialysis centers on the island. Those who, for example, are forced to travel to another region of Italy to undergo treatment or surgery on their return to Sardinia may have difficulty finding a place in a dialysis centre".
An example comes from one of the latest cases reported to Asnet, the story of Aldo Manzanares, a resident of Budoni who, after undergoing dialysis in the Olbia hospital, went to Bologna for treatment, tests and surgery: for more than for a month he has been trying to plan his return to his country without success, with the risk of not even being able to vote in the administrative elections on 28 May. "At the hospital in Olbia they tell me that they don't have beds or staff available, so they postpone my return from week to week," says Manzanares. "But is this denial of a benefit normal for a resident nephropathic?".
Here is the testimony of another dialysis patient, resident in the province of Frosinone: «I own a house in Badesi together with my wife, who is a native of the place. For the first time in fifty years of marriage we won't be able to come to Sardinia because my condition on dialysis doesn't allow it. In February, I sent an email to the Gallura local health authority to book dialysis at the Tempio Pausania hospital, even for just one week in the period of their choice, but I got no response. Same thing at San Camillo in Sassari. It's not a matter of vacation, there are friends and family that I will never be able to see again ».
(Unioneonline/ss)