ROME, Apr 8 — At the Locri hospital in southern Italy, patients are often sent elsewhere for lack of doctors, the lifts are endlessly in disrepair and the CT scan works one day, but not the next. Infiltration by the mafia, severe doctor shortages, and a regional health agency hundreds of millions...
Bruna Filippone, a Locri resident who in February started a citizen’s group ‘Defend the Hospital’, poses in the southern city of Locri in the Italian Calabria region, on April 7, 2020. — AFP pic
In regions such as Lombardy and Piedmont some hospitals rival the best in Europe, but unrelenting waves of patients, combined with too few doctors, ventilators and supplies, have brought them to breaking point. Calabria’s death toll has risen to 60 since the first fatality reported on March 14, with an average of four new deaths each day over the past week.
Even before the coronavirus crisis gripped Italy, Locri residents in February formed a citizens’ group to save their local hospital. An investigation by prosecutors found a series of anomalies, including invoices paid twice, some in the millions of euros, contracts given without public tenders, and salaries paid to officials banned from public office.The agency had a cumulative debt of over 420 million euros by the end of 2017, credit rating agency CRIF Ratings wrote in report last year.
“In Italy, in our constitution, we have the right to health care,” said mayor Calabrese. “This right has never been respected in Locri.” In an October 2019 review of Calabria’s system, Italy’s Audit Court wrote that “services offered continue to remain at inadequate levels”. A woman prays in the an empty church as people stay home to curb the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, in Locri, a southern Italian city in the Calabria region, on April 7, 2020. — AFP picCalabria has the fewest hospital beds per 1000 inhabitants, at 81. That compares to 138 in Emilia Romagna in Italy’s north, the highest, according to 2017 data from national statistics agency Istat.
Last week, the special commissioner appointed by Santelli to manage Calabria’s coronavirus crisis, including medical equipment purchasing, resigned after saying in a televised interview that medical supplies didn’t interest him and he didn’t know what a ventilator did.
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