Too many elderly people are in the emergency room for trivial reasons, thus risking overwhelming the emergency system and forcing the elderly themselves to wait long times in a place that is often "not the safest" for them .
The appeal comes from the AOU of Sassari , which draws the attention of family members and caregivers: «This is not the safest and most effective solution».
The health authority starts from a fact: 30% of visits to the Emergency Room involve people over 75 and in more than half of the cases these are problems of low clinical complexity , for which "more adequate healthcare responses exist outside the hospital".
The Emergency Department, the AOU points out, "is structured to address sudden and serious events, acute and time-dependent conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, major trauma, or severe respiratory difficulties. It is a high-intensity care environment, often crowded and noisy, where intervention priorities are established through triage, which evaluates clinical severity rather than the order of arrival."
And the elderly who access it for non-urgent problems are forced to wait for long periods. Hours spent in a chair or on a stretcher carry risks: disorientation, worsening general condition, increased risk of falls, dehydration, stress, and contracting infectious diseases from other patients who flock to the emergency room.
Often during this period, the AOU emphasizes, many conditions such as fever are linked to seasonal or flu viruses which, in most cases, resolve with rest, adequate hydration, and symptomatic therapy.
Hence the appeal: "Bringing an elderly person to the emergency room 'just to be safe' doesn't always mean protecting them. In many cases, the most prudent choice is to contact local services and the relevant professionals , avoiding an environment that can worsen an already delicate condition. Responsible behavior on everyone's part helps improve the quality of care and make the emergency system more efficient, equitable, and safe."
All true, but it should be emphasized that the overcrowding in emergency rooms is also due to a lack of screening, to an increasingly critical community health system that leaves patients without assistance, forcing them to go to the hospital even for the most trivial reasons.
According to Agenas data, general practitioners have decreased by 16% in the last 10 years (from 1,147 to 961, from a ratio of 0.82 to 0.70 per thousand inhabitants), and pediatricians by 25% (from 187 to 140). And Sardinians without healthcare number over 300,000, a figure destined to increase inexorably with retirements in the coming years .
(Unioneonline)
