"With the pandemic, the workload of family doctors has exploded. There is a lot of talk about us in managing Covid, forgetting that we have to manage ordinary activities: now that the emergency has lasted for 9 months, we have to choose which address to give to primary care ".
This is the complaint that comes from the 37th National Congress of the Italian Society of General Medicine (Simg), ongoing until Sunday 29 November.
"We therefore need new resources to strengthen family medicine by equipping it with administrative and nursing staff", even more so if we want to involve it in contact tracing, underlines Alberto Magni, Simg Head of Youth Policies.
Following the progressive aging of the population "general practitioners have gone from 7 contacts per patient per year in 2009, to 10 contacts in 2019, with an increase of 30%. In this context, the coronavirus emergency has entered , in the first wave, an imbalance of professional activity towards the management of the patient affected by Covid-19.
"The management of the population affected by chronic diseases in the first phase of the pandemic - continues Magni - was fragmented. After the first wave, we quickly reoriented our professional activity towards this population; now the resumption of infections has again determined pressure on the operators, because the management of the emergency was added to the ordinary work as well as the beginning of the Vaccination Campaign for influenza ".
If you are unable to manage patients suffering from chronicity there is a risk, in fact, he concludes, "of seeing later the consequences of the lack of medical visits, examinations and follow up".