Head-on accident with three injured. One, the most serious, is immediately taken care of by the 118 rescuers and transported to hospital. Another has some bruises and does not need to be transferred to the emergency room. The third suffers some fractures and is in excruciating pain. But he will have to wait about an hour (at least) inside the cockpit: there are no ambulances to help him. The incident dates back to the evening of Wednesday 11 October, in Cagliari. This was not an isolated incident. That suffering motorist is the result of an emergency-urgency system that is struggling throughout Sardinia . Areus, the regional agency that manages rescue services on the island, also says so: certain problems are becoming "chronic" pathologies.
The causes? Various. And difficult to deal with. Those who work in the field speak of a shortage of personnel - doctors and nurses - which leads to the blocking of ambulances outside the emergency rooms , of an insufficient number of vehicles in the area (a lack of medical vehicles, above all), of departments that do not welcome patients, thus forced to stay on stretchers that don't go back (and sometimes disappear). And, again, there is "the absence of family doctors and medical guards, who no longer act as a filter towards the hospitals".
Health facilities which in Cagliari, for example, "have shrunk with the closure of the Marino, which no longer accepts emergencies", explains Antonio Anedda, 118 doctor and representative of Fismu (Italian Trade Union Federation of United Doctors). The advanced aid stations in Sardinia, therefore with doctors and nurses on board, "are just 24, the same as in 1999. To clarify: in Cagliari there are only two".
Enrico Fresu
