In a few days, between Christmas and New Year, "there was a new shameful escalation of violence against our nurses, who have been engaged for a few weeks in a new delicate battle to face a variant of Covid, Omicron, which runs as fast as ever and which is once again radically changing our lives, our daily lives ".
This was reported by Antonio De Palma, National President of Nursing Up, a union of nurses who declares himself ready to appear as a civil party in defense of his colleagues.
In the capital, San Giovanni Addolorata and the Tor Vergata Polyclinic "have become real rings on holidays, taken by assault by the sick and patients who are decidedly out of control".
A nurse from San Giovanni, from whom a patient even bitten a phalanx, and then a health worker who in Tor Vergata was repeatedly punched in the chest until he fell to the ground and fractured a limb, reporting a two-week prognosis : these are the facts that our local contacts report to us ", explains De Palma.
"The dizzying increase in hospitalizations, in the midst of the fourth wave of Covid, concretely risks generating a new paralysis in an already staggering health system. And it is clear that, in the face of the chronic shortage of personnel that can reach even the 110 thousand units, with hospitals struggling with the unstoppable growth of infections of health workers (there are 2490 more in the last 48 hours, this is equivalent to 2041 nurses infected in the first two days of the new year!), yes situations of real chaos occur, particularly in the emergency room, generated by stress, fear and most of the time by the total inadequacy of hospital facilities.
It starts with threats, such as those that occurred at the Policlinico Umberto I, where on Boxing Day, a 71-year-old brandishes a screwdriver against the nurses, and on to the actual physical attacks.
Dozens of patients queuing in an emergency room in San Camillo by now saturated where there is not even room to welcome the waiting sick, forced to remain outside, or just two nurses to manage about fifty patients in the Polyclinic of Tor Vergata waiting for a bed, or even at the Sant'Andrea, always in the emergency room, over 80 people waiting for treatment, more than half of which need hospitalization that we are not sure of being able to obtain ".