A project to strengthen home care for elderly peoplea concrete response to the indications of Mission 6 Health of the PNRR. It is that of Confcommearcio Health, Healthcare and Carewho developed it in the reality of the city of Genoa together with Confindustria Health Section, Aiop e Federfarma.
«The progressive increase in longevity certainly creates a series of advantages: living better and longer is positive, but it also involves problems related to the support needed to accompany this process» says Luca Pallavicinipresident of Confcommercio Salute, Sanità e Cura. “Even in the path of prevention of limitations to physical and cognitive abilities, we find ourselves in a situation in which we have many elderly people, and this clashes with the resources we have available. We cannot have resources for everyone at a time when there is a decline in people working and growing unemployment.”
On March 11, 2024, the Government approved the Legislative Decree implementing Delegated Law 33/2023 containing the reform of non-self-sufficiency. This is a law that develops the project for the future of elderly care provided for by the Delegated Law. However, according to many observers, the criteria of the Delegated Law have been followed in a very partial way, reducing its transformative ambition. In the proposal of Confcommercio Salute, Sanità e Cura, residential facilities for the elderly or disabled, rehabilitation facilities, pharmacies, laboratories, health facilities constitute the nodes of presence, listening, response of the Social and Health Service in a defined territorial area, in close synergy with general practitioners, municipal services and health professions.
The coordination role of the network is carried out by a hub, preferably a residential facility accredited in that specific area. The hub, where the requests for intervention converge, is responsible for the Individualized Care Plan, of which they manage the consequent operations: from listening to the social home service to the integrated one, from laboratory services to home diagnostics in situ or with transfer to health facilities, with or without the aid of teleassistance, telediagnostics or telemedicine tools. In the social-health sector, the Pai, following a multidisciplinary assessment, is always necessarily validated by the relevant service of the reference ASL.
“Our Plan provides that within territorial centers, where you can turn to for a series of needs, there is the intervention of nurses who can start an individualized care plan,” says Pallavicini. “I believe that home services, as provided for by the Pnrr, must find a serious landing place for people at home, which is not so obvious. When we talk about people who can stay at home, we are referring to single people, widows, without children, a category of people who can have different incomes. Working on the research on Genoa we went to see district by district, constituency by constituency, how many inhabitants are over 80 years old. And we realized that we have to take care of these people to prevent them from going to RSA: there are about 380 thousand places in Italy for those who need continuous care. They are no longer the nursing homes they once were, now they are just RSA full of care needs, equal to long-term hospital stays.”