They were supposed to revolutionize local healthcare, but they risk remaining cathedrals in the desert. The Community Houses in Sardinia, the flagship promised by the Pnrr, exist more on paper than on the ground: structures built but without services, inert community hospitals, lacking staff and increasingly disheartened citizens. The picture that emerged from the Iares analysis, based on data from the Gimbe Foundation, is worrying. And it sounds like an alarm bell one year before the Plan expires.
A few months after the PNRR goal, in fact, the revolution of territorial healthcare in the Island risks remaining just a title on a presentation slide. The alarm is raised by the report signed by Vania Statzu for Iares Sardegna, which has reworked the data of the Gimbe Observatory on the state of healthcare implementation in Sardinia. The numbers speak for themselves: many promised facilities, very few actually active services.
Of the 1,717 facilities planned throughout Italy, a full 62% do not yet offer any services. But Sardinia has one of the worst figures: out of 80 Community Houses funded, only 4 have activated at least one service. None – zero – offer the entire minimum package planned. Things are worse with Community hospitals: only one out of 33 has declared itself partially operational, just 3% compared to the national 21.8%.
"The real emergency is the lack of staff, especially nursing staff," explained Mauro Carta, regional president of Acli, who is calling for a decisive change of pace: "We need to make a move to prevent these facilities from remaining empty boxes, or worse, from losing funding."
There is, however, a light in the darkness: the Electronic Health Record. Sardinia stands out for the completeness of the digital documents available – a good 94% of the types provided – but participation by citizens remains low, held back by doubts about the safety and real usefulness of the tool.
The picture drawn by the survey highlights all the contradictions of a healthcare system that aims for digitalization but stumbles on the foundations of its presence on the territory. "Between delays, approaching deadlines and insufficient staff, the real risk is that Sardinia will once again remain on the margins of modernization," concludes Carta.
