The truce is over, the emergency room of the Santissima Annunziata di Sassari has plunged back into chaos. The assault of a doctor by a psychiatric patient on Sunday evening was just the latest case that is agitating the medical and nursing staff.
The decision of the new director, Stefano Sau, to assign six of Obi's ten available posts to Gastroenterology is under accusation. The OBI (Intensive Short Observation) is a sort of Emergency Department where patients are detained whose problem is presumed to be resolved within 36 hours.
In this way we avoid hospitalizing and overcrowding the wards that already suffer from the chronic lack of beds.
"After the first chaotic period during the pandemic", is the content of a confidential document circulating among the staff, "whoever directed the emergency room managed to create shared paths with the departments of the entire company, with the aim of don't make the whole system implode. It would have been all too easy to admit all patients already evaluated in the emergency room to the wards already at the limit, further increasing their congestion and putting the system in plaster ”.
"Of course, there was a further overload of work in the PS", we read again, "which in any case led to never closing even for an hour, without ever having an ambulance file, unlike what happened for example at the Brotzu in Cagliari " .
The Sassari emergency room is under unspeakable pressure, with patients arriving from Olbia, Ozieri, Alghero, Nuoro and even Lanusei.
The staff are overwhelmed. Here is what doctors and nurses say in the document (whose names are omitted to protect them from possible retaliation) of the new director: "From the moment of his arrival, the strategic moves have been to substantially cancel all the paths taken, including sharing of the choices (the wards say that the admissions arrive as suppositories with the consequence that the system will implode); it also decided to dismantle the Obi by reducing it from 10 to 4 seats with the consequence of congesting the PS even more ”.
The climate that is being created is explosive, with requests for leave, transfers and leave from staff who are barely able to cope with the workload.
"That being the case", says the staff, "for the first week of November it will not be possible to cover shifts".
Bad conditions for the autumn-winter season with the inevitable increase in access to the emergency room due to a probable increase in infections from Covid and other pathologies typical of the period.
