A hug in RSA. For real. Live. A caress without plexiglass, without a dedicated room around it, without knobs, without cellophane. For example Ida, 95, will be able to touch her son Fabrizio for the first time since Christmas 2019, in the garden of the Apsp Suor Agnese residence in Castello Tesino. Like them, a people of broken families will reunite: a father and a daughter, a wife and a husband, grandparents and grandchildren. Friends will be able to shake hands again. Normal, simple gestures of affection, usually taken for granted but so far impossible, of those that for a year have been advised against and prohibited in the name of the Covid emergency. Now you can. It can be done in the structures of Trentino, where 92% of nursing and retirement home residents were vaccinated: the new RSA Guidelines transmitted today by the Autonomous Province of Trento provide for the possibility of direct physical contact between resident and family member from 1 May.
Vaccines and swabs
Contact also in the form of a hug and physical closeness, if the family member vaccinated or has evidence of a negative swab not earlier than 48 hours. Contact with more than one family member outdoors, one at a time indoors (even for bedridden people). A small great reconquest of life, of humanity, a meritorious step that cannot be ignored in the rest of Italy, where the blame for responsibility has left all the weight of the (im) possible reopening on the shoulders of the health directors of the individual structures.
Not just restaurants
At the national level, little is said about it. Guilty. And instead, in the midst of this more or less interested silence, between shrugs and empty calls to caution, not only the restaurants and swimming pools reopen but also the RSAs (some, still too few). They reopen in Trentino, thanks to the reasonable dialogue between institutions and professionals. The proposals of UPIPA, (Provincial Union of Institutions for Assistance), the body that collects public structures in the area, have led the way. Upstream is the experience of France, which opened homes for the elderly as early as March 13 last with analogous modalities. From this week, on the other side of the Alps, it will also be possible in Italy.
Without barriers and surveillance
Of course, very carefully: careful planning of the meetings must be guaranteed in order to avoid gatherings. S to personal protective equipment and distancing from other residents. But without physical barriers and without continuous surveillance by a facility operator. The RSAs in Trentino cease to be forts with a raised drawbridge. Even those who, in these long months, have not directly experienced the excruciating experience of detachment can understand the significance of this step. A long awaited step. Thousands of elderly and family members in this country, already vaccinated or potentially buffered, have wondered. With love, anger, sadness, exhaustion: why can’t we really meet, without barriers? Thousands of operators in the facilities prayed for meeting spaces to open, in compliance with the reasonable safety standards that the pandemic requires.
And the other regions?
What are the other Italian regions different from Trentino and France? The provisions in our country, from the government downwards, have effectively prescribed the closure of the structures, leaving the burden of reopening them to the health directors of each home. From Paris to Trento the reasoning was the opposite. Generally speaking, it is decided to reopen, because people have been vaccinated, because there are tampons. It reopens except for emergency conditions (outbreaks etc) which will be evaluated from time to time by the medical directors, thus relieved of the weight of a choice that to date in Italy can drag them to court, with the possibility of being accused in the case of resumption of infections.
The lady who only moves her eyes
A mirage. A hug. A walk in the garden arm in arm with a loved one, in that age of life when every day, every grain of time, is perhaps worth more. And so in Castello Tesino that lady in a wheelchair who, due to an illness, only moves her eyes will be able to see her husband buzzing around again, before the omnipresent Covid. Together outdoors, in freedom, without knobs and cellophane as in the hug house. In Trentino it is possible. What is the rest of Italy waiting for?
April 26, 2021 (change April 26, 2021 | 18:21)
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