Hospital emergency, overbooking and staff shortages in internal medicine departments

SOS beds and staff in over half of the Italian internal medicine departments . In fact, 58% are overbooked , that is, they have a bed occupancy rate of over 100%, while 40.28% of the departments occupy between 70 and 100% of the available beds .

This means having patients assisted even on a stretcher in the corridor, with only one partition to guarantee privacy. This emergency situation is also exacerbated by the chronic shortage of staff, found in 85.65% of the departments from the North to the South of Italy. This is the picture that emerges from the survey conducted by the Federation of Italian Hospital Internal Medicine (Fadoi) on 216 operating units in all Italian regions.

The Internal Medicine departments of our hospitals , internists emphasize, are those that assist almost half of the hospitalized patients , especially the elderly and chronically ill with comorbidities. Patients who require increasingly complex care, which would require adequate supplies of beds and staff. This, while about a third of hospitalizations could instead be avoided with better management of territorial health services and if only a little more prevention were done, but the reform of territorial health "is still struggling - says Fadoi - even if patients are less alone today after discharge and the percentage of those who go home but with integrated home care activated has risen to 43.98%".

"The increasingly critical situation in which the internal medicine departments, which are strategic for the entire hospital care system, find themselves, depends not least on the incorrect classification of our departments as low, rather than medium-high intensity care - explains the president of Fadoi, Francesco Dentali -. This translates into a lower provision of personnel and diagnostic instruments that increasingly strain internal medicine". Staff shortages and overwork for doctors in the departments also determine another consequence: almost half of the professionals no longer have time to do research and 43% do less than they would like.