GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th September, 2020) ENOA, September 18 (Sputnik), Anastasia Levchenko - Italy's Liguria region needs a complete overhaul of its sanitary system, which at the moment lacks disease prevention initiatives and is designed in a way that encourages people to turn to private centers rather than public service providers, Alice Salvatore, the candidate for Liguria presidency at the upcoming regional elections, told Sputnik in an interview.
From September 20-21, regional elections will take place in Liguria, as well as eight other Italian regions, and will coincide with the constitutional referendum on the reduction in the number of lawmakers. Salvatore, the former member of the Five Star Movement (M5S), is a candidate from the newly created Il Buonsenso ("Common Sense") movement, which she established and which will run in the election separately from the center-left alliance of M5S and the Democratic Party (PD).
"The cultural paradigm of how the healthcare system works and is managed should be changed by putting prevention policies first. Prevention should come through proper nutrition, through the practice of sport, but also there should be medical preventive measures, that is having people undergo clinical examinations when they are still healthy and young in order to prevent any development of pathologies perhaps linked to bad habits or to the constitution, in a way to ensure that the person lives in health and that there are no subsequent economic costs of health management that come when it is necessary to deal with complex pathologies when there are more complicated and even life-threatening situations," Salvatore said.
Prevention should be exercised not only at the personal but also at the institutional level, according to the candidate who criticized the region for how it addressed the coronavirus pandemic.
Salvatore noted that emergency response protocols were not updated in Liguria, stockpiles of personal protection equipment were not created, and the number of intensive therapy beds in hospitals was not increased in advance after the first signs of the epidemic, though it was clear that the disease would spread in the highly interconnected world, and it is the responsibility of the regional authorities, not central, do adopt such measures.
Liguria, however, did not face the surge in COVID-19 cases, as neighboring Lombardy did, for example.
"After the pandemic moment, I am talking about the end of the lockdown, from mid-May until now, there was time to organize to also update these pandemic plans and apply them. Unfortunately, I see inaction, now there is an emergency situation again in the province of La Spezia for example, I get reports about terrible working conditions of social and health workers who are not tested even if they come into contact with COVID-19 patients unless they themselves become symptomatic. But we are well aware that COVID-19 can also be asymptomatic. This is dangerous both for workers and all other hospital patients," Salvatore said.
Over the past few weeks, La Spezia province in the Liguria region has had the highest infection rate in Italy per every 100,000 inhabitants.
Another reform that the region should adopt, according to Salvatore, should be in the changes in the reward system for doctors and medical workers. At the moment, bonuses are given mainly to those who manage to cut expenditures and save costs.
"Instead, these rewards should be decided on the basis of the state of health of the population, based for example on seeing if there are particular mortality incidences for certain diseases and in that case not giving a reward," Salvatore said.
Finally, Il Buonsenso movement is strongly supporting the idea of closing the so-called accredited private clinics in Liguria.
As of today, if one needs to see a specialist or do some tests in Liguria, he has the right to do it at a public hospital for free or by paying a small state fee. However, the waiting lists are so long that one may have to wait for months before getting an appointment. An alternative option to save money � since there is always also the option to visit a fully private specialist or laboratory and pay a high price � is to turn to a so-called accredited private medical center ("privati convenzionati"), which means that it has an accord with the government and if the patient has a prescription for tests given by his family doctor, they will be done for free or for the same small fee as at a public hospital.
"Private accreditation is a sort of institutionalized scam because it is presented as if there were an economic saving, but in reality, it is not so because the Region delegates services to private clinics that are not really private ... but instead, these private accredited clinics do business with public money that cascades continuously, to provide a public service," Salvatore said.
"Moreover, the private accredited centers have an interest in competing with public medical centers, so there are these endless waiting lists [at the public hospitals]. ... There is the interest that these waiting lists are always longer and more infinite so that patients then end up in the private sector. It does not work like that, it is very wrong," she continued.
Holding elections and having reopened schools on September 14 in the current conditions, when the risk of COVID-19 is not over yet, is also short-sighted, according to the candidate. She noted that an electronic vote could be a solution, yet Italy "is still far behind in the respect, Italians vote using pencil and paper."
