matteo donati

Review of Ospedale Sant'Orsola-Malpighi

Geriatrics Department: Delirium room. An unhappy n...

Geriatrics Department: Delirium room. An unhappy name for a nightmare place where the patient is left more to the care of family members than to the staff, always in a hurry and never timely following the calls. In this ward you will not find, as the name would like to suggest, only patients with dementia. But you will encounter the most disparate pathologies, grouped into chaotic rooms by as many as six patients each. Having a close relative here hospitalized for diabetes problems, I had the opportunity to note the following: at the reception (marked with times 11: 45/12: 15) the doctor (Macchiarulo) showed up an hour and twenty late. Without any explanation or excuse for this disservice, he said for the third time that the intervention necessary for the patient (suffering from a gangrene in the degenerative phase) was imminent. For the third time I asked for a certain date, even weeks later, in order to extract the patient from the dilapidated structure and bring it back only on the occasion of the operation. The answers, for the third time, were the most evasive, attributing the blame to the "direction", without ever giving me a single name with which to confer. Not only that, I was told that if I wanted "not to lose priority" I would have to leave the patient in the ward. I have not been given any opportunity to "set a date" or to know when the operation could actually have proceeded. The answer provided is always the same: "we hope ..." Or "there are good chances that". Furthermore, the human side is almost totally absent: part of the staff refuses to feed non-autonomous patients, discharging this burden on the family (if by chance a family member cannot go to the hospital or cannot afford a paid caregiver, he must therefore expect that your dear fasts?). In addition to the meetings the touch shown by some doctors was shameful: to explain surgical procedures inherent in the diabetic foot, I personally witnessed the metaphor of "sliced salami", used in front of a family member already shaken by personal drama. The impression of this department is that all those people whom society has already renounced because unproductive, or the elderly with serious ailments, end up there. Apparently born as a sector dedicated to senile dementia, the ward is to be considered semi-phantom: equipped with very few staff, sometimes unmotivated and rude (especially the representatives of the receptions). To any complaint about the obvious discomfort to which the patient and family members are subjected, the answer you will encounter will be a shrug. Hope that nobody dear to you ever happens in this specific area of Sant'Orsola. In this case you will have to be willing to change yourself, feed the patient and you will be left in the total mercy of events. As local guide Google I also proceeded to forward a complaint to the aforementioned "direction", hoping that fewer and fewer people should find themselves in my same position.