Hospital network, black smoke at the Sicilian Regional Assembly. De Luca (M5S): "This is a disaster."

"There's no need to rush, we need to do it well, and right now, that's not being done at all. In fact, to be honest, the current draft of the hospital network is a disaster. Even the majority is hypercritical of the government's decisions and the cuts, which, frankly, are incomprehensible." This was stated by Antonio De Luca, leader of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in the Sicilian Regional Assembly (ARS), a member of the Health Committee, on the sidelines of today's meeting on the hospital network, which was postponed to a later date without any progress being made. "We can't," De Luca said, "operate in the dark, or almost, as is currently being done. We need to listen to the local communities and convene administrators, managers, committees, and staff before the committee. We also need data on the local network, the operational units, and the networks connected to the hospital network." "We can't," De Luca concludes, "plan the future by poorly looking at the past, and this network is merely a poor redesign of the 2022 one, which in turn was a modification of the one never implemented, produced by then-Councilor Gucciardi. In other words, it's an old network, even if it's yet to be built, and therefore suffers from four general negative factors:

1) Since it is a network reworked from the one in DA 19/2022, which in turn modified the previous network, it has a decades-long basis that does not take into account the demographic shift that has occurred in the meantime. 2) It does not consider activity data for individual provincial situations, not even for large areas (surgical and medical). 3) It does not consider intra-regional catchment flows by specialty (flows I have officially requested several times), which would tell us where to cut and where to increase or activate with full knowledge of the facts. 4) It does not link to disease-specific mortality data, which shows striking discrepancies between provinces, which are indicative of the ineffectiveness of local Diagnostic Therapeutic Care Pathways (PDTA), to the detriment of equal access to hospital services regardless of residence. A prime example? Mortality from diabetes, a disease with a broad social impact. A situation that currently classifies users as series A and series B in the same region and does not take into account the worrying differences in life expectancy."