Healthcare, hospitals in Italy at the top for quality of care: here’s what they are

2023-10-26 14:00:43

There are two Italian hospitals, both public and accredited private, that pass with flying colors the evaluation for the quality of care in all sectors examined by the National Agency for Regional Health Services (Agenas): the Humanitas of Rozzano and the university hospital of the Marche ‘Riuniti’ of Ancona. This is what emerges from the ‘National Outcomes Program (Pne), 2023 edition, presented today in Rome and based on 2022 data.

There are 8 hospitals to watch out for low quality care

Eight Italian hospitals, between North and South, have a low quality of care and “must be paid attention to”. Data and names “will be sent to the monitoring table of the essential levels of assistance”. In general, regarding the quality of hospital care, said the general director of Agenas Domenico Mantoan, “we have highlighted some chiaroscuro. And this year, for the first time, we will send the report on the data presented today to the Lea monitoring table, because we must address the issue of a series of hospitals in our country where the quality of care is very low. Therefore, accompanying, audit and verification policies must be implemented to understand why the quality of care is so low in some Italian structures. We cannot afford these differences”, he warns. The map of inefficient hospitals “goes from North to South, there are negative things and positive things both in the North and in the South”, details Mantoan.

The evaluation system

“With the Pne – Domenico Mantoan, general director of Agenas, explains to time.news Salute – we have a system for evaluating the quality of care in individual departments, and we could even go as far as individual operators. Our objective, however, is to evaluate the quality of care in general. By putting together the results of the individual departments, in the structures that were able to evaluate the number on all the available indicators, we also trace the general activity of the hospitals. In this context, the two hospitals where we found high quality in all the departments are the Irccs Humanitas and the public hospital of Ancona. It should be underlined that there are hospitals that perhaps have maximum excellence in some disciplines and then are lacking in others”.

It is, “evidently also a management issue. It is therefore not just an element linked to the individual professional but it is a set of activities made up of the professional, the management that chooses him and the organization that allows everyone to work well. And then, since these are the same hospitals that distinguished themselves last year, this shows that the good results are not a coincidence, it means that there is a working method there”, he concluded.

Agenas: “The gap between excellence and low quality hospitals is widening”

The ‘gap’ is widening between excellent hospitals, which offer high quality care, and facilities where care is deficient. “These differences have increased, there is more heterogeneity between regions, but above all within the regions themselves”, Marina Davoli, technical manager of the National Outcomes Program, explains to time.news Salute on the sidelines of the presentation of the 2023 Report, today in Rome .

“In many regions there are structures, out of 1,400 public and private hospitals evaluated – he underlines – which have very good values ​​and others much less. In both cases, we are also talking about important structures, which admit an adequate number of cases. In some cases, within the same region the differences are greater than in comparison with other regions. This means that a citizen, remaining in his territory, will have very different quality assistance depending on the structure chosen. There are regions where even no structure reaches the necessary level, but in most cases they are all close to average levels”.

“Unfortunately – adds Davoli – even when good values ​​are achieved in some areas for quality of assistance, important differences are observed at the same time at a regional level. We still need to work on equity of access. We see an extreme example in Sicily for the times of surgery for broken femur, which is one of the indicators evaluated, where there are structures that operate in the first 48 hours in over 80% of cases and others, in this case 3, which stop at less than 10%. a huge difference.”