The situation is dramatic: a woman with a certain diagnosis of breast cancer is not operated on for seventy days. While the path that each Region must define, according to the Ministry of Health, is a maximum of one month. At the Businco of Cagliari, where patients arrive from all over Sardinia, once upon a time there were 750 "first cases" treated per year (a number that placed the structure at the top of the national ranking), today there are around 500. The hours available in the operating room have drastically reduced and there is not enough staff: it has happened, eight times since the beginning of the year, that the interventions already scheduled, with the patients hospitalized and "ready", have been canceled at the last minute because it is missed an anesthetist or nurse. For a preventive mastectomy (to understand, the operation Angelina Jolie and Bianca Balti had to undergo) a girl was sent to Mater Olbia, where the only possibility of proceeding quickly was to have it in solvency , paying 23 thousand euros.
The complaint
«I have been contacted by several desperate patients. We are not talking about things that can be postponed, in these cases the passing of time can mean living or dying», says Annalisa Mele, doctor and regional councilor of the Reformers, who has decided to denounce with all her might the unsustainable condition into which he has fallen the hospital in via Jenner, and to involve the other female councilors to go to the health councilor to ask for explanations and demand urgent solutions. «It seems that the plan is to weaken the service», she warns, «and I'm not willing to accept it», moreover, «the oncological Cup has never started».
The starting point of the serious hardships, explains Mele, is «the unification, which took place in 2015, of the Oncology department in the Brotzu company, when the complex structure of Oncological Surgery and Breast Medicine was created, into which surgical Oncology and the Experimental Surgery of Businco, and the Senology of San Michele. Previously, these structures had a total of 72 hours of operating theater and treated over 750 first cases of breast cancer a year, but the new structure was instead assigned only 36 hours of operating theater, so the volume of tumors treated was reduced about 500 a year, with waiting times for surgery that currently amount to about 70 days from histological diagnosis".
Structure
Thus, one of the most important breast surgery structures in Italy, today has lost a lot of ground and is unable to give effective answers to Sardinian women who fall ill with breast cancer.
The anesthesiologists are understaffed by four units, the nurses by two, so it is enough for just one of these people to be absent and the operating session is cancelled, with further repercussions on the waiting list.
All the details in Cristina Cossu's article on the Unione Sarda on newsstands
abbonati.unionesarda.it/Edicola