BOLZANO. “The choice to postpone the operation is due to exclusively clinical reasons.” He states it Umberto Taitdirector of the Bolzano health district of the ASL after a Venetian tourist, Salvatore Pandolfohad reported not having been operated on because the priority was local hospitalizations.
Thus Tait: «During the holiday period it is usual to record a significant increase in hospitalizations of trauma patients requiring surgery, in the areas relating to orthopedics and traumatology due to the increase in tourist numbers. At the same time there is a simultaneous decrease in the general availability of operating rooms which are and remain shared with the urgencies-emergencies of other surgical disciplines. Patients with uncomplicated fractures were therefore sent to other health districts in Alto Adige or to affiliated clinics, in order to be able to operate on those who were fragile or had complex, non-transportable fractures. In the case of tourists with mild orthopedic fractures that can wait for surgery, is always presented as well possibility of returning to your home: not from a discriminatory perspective, but to facilitate more local and therefore advantageous care in the hospitalization and post-operative phases».
Tait continues: «In this specific case, the patient was admitted to the vascular surgery department on 3 January due to the prevalence of the pathology: the clavicle fracture did not require emergency treatment. The continued hospitalization in vascular surgery was justified by the type of chest trauma suffered in the fall and not by the clavicle fracture, which – alone – would have led to discharge already in the emergency room and not to hospitalization. As it was possible to verify in the documents, these circumstances were explained to the patient at the time of the orthopedic consultation in the emergency room and also, again, on the afternoon of 7 January by the doctors of the orthopedic department. According to what the head of orthopedics tells us, on January 7 the patient expressed to some orthopedic doctors in the department the preference for a return to one’s home. However, he was asked to try to stay in case space became available in the operating room the following day, inserting him as a mere reserve and therefore keeping him fasting as a precaution from midnight on January 7th. However, this is without certainty of intervention. On the morning of January 8, unfortunately, as more urgent and non-postponable fractures had occurred, it was inevitable to inform the patient that the possibility of the operation – which, as mentioned, was a mere possibility – no longer existed on the current day and week. The patient finally had the opportunity to have an interview with two doctors on 8 December, during which his situation was explained to him again and the appropriate examination and placement of the brace was carried out. The doctors in the department also found that the pain reported was largely attributable to the chest trauma reported.”
«Everything – concludes Tait – was determined by choices and circumstances of an exclusively clinical nature and not connected to other aspects. Naturally, the health authority expresses human understanding for how the patient may have experienced these situations, which are always delicate when one finds oneself – even unexpectedly – to be a “patient” far from one’s home and is sorry if any misunderstandings were generated from the point of communicative view”.