“The results of the massive immunization campaign” against Covid-19 “are there for all to see. The commitment now is to convince the undecided and the ‘no vax’ in every way, in order to guarantee the widest coverage of the population.. Schools, universities, offices are reopening and transport will be increasingly overcrowded. These are all risk factors, together with the possibility of the onset of new variants “of Sars-CoV-2,” in addition to the already known and more widespread Delta variant. Eugenio Gaudio, former rector of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, today Health Area Consultant to the Minister of the University, opened his speech this morning at the round table ‘National health service and post-Covid health management‘, promoted within the 27th National Congress of Digestive Diseases Fismad, scheduled from 22 to 25 September in online mode due to the anti-pandemic rules.
“Faced with the pandemic – underlined Gaudio – preventive models from all over the world have often proved fallacious and any forecast has no certain reliability. But it is appropriate to say that the vaccination campaign that is massively developing in Italy has given results that we all see. Now we have to convince those who have not yet undergone vaccination because they are undecided or against it, for the good of the entire population “.
As for the Green pass, “certainly for doctors and healthcare professionals having it is a moral and ethical duty. It falls within their responsibilities, the opposite is unthinkable from an ethical and professional point of view – he observed – The position of doctors must have its own characteristic of scientificity and respect for the patient“.
On the last year and a half marked by the pandemic, the former rector of Sapienza has no doubts: “We all suffered, the university world suffered and medical training was also affected. There has been a conversion of teaching hospitals into hospitals dedicated to the Covid emergency, and this has resulted in a stop of practical internships for students of Medicine and Surgery, for nurses and postgraduates. So we expect the vaccination campaign to go ahead and that the reopening of schools, the massive use of transport will not lead to a significant increase in hospital admissions and intensive care. But above all, the hope is that teaching can be resumed within hospitals, a fundamental pillar because the pandemic has not only mortgaged a year and a half of our lives, but it also risks mortgaging the future of the country from an economic point of view and the preparation of its ruling class“.
Regarding the ‘Health Mission’ of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) to support the National Health Service, hard hit by the pandemic which has highlighted critical issues and areas for improvement, according to Gaudio “the health emergency on the one hand highlighted the excellence of our public health, which responded excellently despite the lack of an updated operational plan against pandemics, but also brought to light criticality of the NHS, for a long time underestimated and underfunded. It will be essential to use the funds of the NRP, which we are only talking about because there are no operational plans, to reconstitute and strengthen a territorial health that can promote health, intercepting needs early through effective models of primary care and socio-health integration. “.
The community hospitals “they will be the cornerstone of this reconstruction, without neglecting home care which must be strengthened – he highlighted – The figure of the general practitioner must also be reviewed, from the point of view of training. Furthermore, we must leave the ‘hospital-centered’ model on which our NHS has been founded since the 1960s, and which today needs to be rethought with qualified hospitals and more services in the area. Just as the NHS is expensive and is destined to default within a few years if we do not take into account three factors: denatality, an aging population, an increase in expensive drugs and technologies “.