“Patients lying on the ground to reduce falls from beds”: the OPI regional coordination replies to the head of the Covid emergency.
Patients lying on the ground to limit the risk of falling out of bed, as if to deny the lack of nurses. A documented shortage in some hospitals with the concomitance of unused Covid wards and emergency rooms that hospitalize the sick on the ground, damaging their right to comfort and dignity.
The Coordination of the Orders of Nursing Professions in Piedmont wants to respond to the statements made by Gianfranco Zulian, head of the Covid emergency in Piedmont, in the episode of the Report broadcast, which aired last November 23rd.
“Dr. Zulian justifies the provision as specifically planned, since it adheres to the”strategy NO”, To limit the risk of falling out of bed. This can only raise doubts about the consistency of this reasoning. As care professionals, we know that a patient’s risk of falling is predominantly determined by a single factor: the more or less adequate presence of nurses who are responsible for assessing this risk and implementing interventions to minimize it. He explains Massimiliano know, president of the Coordination of the Piedmontese OPI.
According to the nurses, take the “In-hospital plan Massive influx of injured“As a shield, claiming to label any abnormal health situation as an” emergency “and trivializing the system to deal with it, is deeply offensive to every professional involved. The situations that can subject the health system to severe suffering are extremely varied and cannot be addressed by brandishing the protocol with eyes closed.
“This” part two “ofCovid emergency it is the important implication of a pandemic, not a scenario of a war nature: since it was preceded by about six months by a totally similar “part one”, it was easily foreseeable and effectively tackled with careful planning. The time and resources were absolutely sufficient to hire the staff to deal with the emergency, let alone prevent patients from falling out of bed. Do we therefore want to argue that, invoking adequate protocols, it is acceptable to lay patients on the floor because the organizational machine was not able to move in time? That a very predictable pandemic scenario should be treated as a sudden catastrophe? », Adds Sciretti on behalf of the OPI presidents of the other Piedmontese provinces.
The numbers are clear: the nurses currently employed in Piedmont are few compared to the real needs. It is mainly citizens who pay for it. Another emergency is added to the emergency: that of health workers who are positive for the virus who – Zulian continues – “may have become infected outside the workplace”.
«Sacrosanct – replies the Coordination Opi – but the opposite cannot be denied either: such a trivialization, especially if externalized by the head of the regional system used to fight the pandemic, is a real slap in the face to the commitment and self-denial that Piedmontese nurses are once again demonstrating, even at the cost of his own health and that of his family ”.
For the Piedmontese professional associations internal investigations, surveys, data, numbers, measurable, elaborable and interpretable values are needed.
It is right that the (too few) nurses employed in the emergency are protected by a reliable and rigorous system, which offers answers and not guesses.
“We have the right to know – he concludes sciretis – if the infected colleagues have been exposed to a greater risk than the rest of the citizens, and – if so – it is necessary that appropriate measures are taken. As professional representatives, we will continue to monitor closely. But if mistakes have been made in the past, they must be analyzed in order to treasure them in the future and not repeat them ».
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