Day of relief, ‘no one is left alone in the tunnel of the disease’

2023-05-24 17:31:19

Public meetings to raise awareness, training in healthcare facilities, free visits to pain therapy clinics, stands of voluntary associations in squares, conferences and training courses for healthcare professionals and volunteers. These are some of the initiatives planned for the 22nd edition of the National Relief Day, Sunday 28 May. The presentation today in Rome with the Ministry of Health, Orazio Schillaci, and the president of the Conference of Regions, Massimiliano Fedriga, together with Vincenzo Morgante, president of the national foundation ‘Gigi Ghirotti’ onlus.

Like every year, Relief Day offers the opportunity to focus attention on the response that our country is able to give to a fundamental and legitimate request of every sick person: “That of not feeling abandoned and alone during illness and not suffer in vain”, recalls the Ghirotti Foundation. If the institutional response came with Law 38 of 2010 (Provisions to guarantee access to palliative care and pain therapy), it is equally known that there are still application difficulties which have accentuated territorial disparities.

“Some decisive steps forward have been taken 13 years after the approval of the law for the diffusion of palliative care, but – Morgante points out – as recently revealed by the report ‘Time for Better Care at the End of Life’ which photographed the situation in many OECD member countries, timely access to adequate end-of-life care to alleviate symptoms for people in the terminal phase is less than 40%, a percentage which in Italy drops to around 35%, even though our country has recently implemented a model of early identification of patients with palliative care needs through the integration of primary care and home palliative care”.

The Gigi Ghirotti Foundation has set up a voluntary observatory for the monitoring of palliative care and pain therapy, “to give a voice to citizens suffering from acute or chronic pain or who access palliative care, to contribute to improving the accessibility and satisfaction of who uses therapies and services. The results of the periodic surveys conducted – the non-profit organization points out – confirm the persistent territorial inhomogeneities that generate unacceptable inequalities. From the difficulty of accessing NHS accredited centers for pain therapy services, especially in the Center-South , to waiting lists connected to the taking charge or functional diagnostic services for oncological pathologies: an odyssey for many people, often forced to turn to private structures or to migrate to other regions with unsustainable economic costs.Crucial challenges for the lives of many people “.

Finally, the Foundation “expresses strong concern about the increasingly alarming social phenomenon of the renunciation of health services, as confirmed by a recent Istat survey, which calculated the percentage of people forced to give up treatment due to economic problems or problems linked to the difficulty of accessing service: the national average has risen to 11%, with some regions exceeding the 13% threshold”.