Italian doctors, nurses and other health professionals are facing an unprecedented wave of violence in the last decade, with extremely dangerous attackslike what happened this week in a hospital in Foggia (south), where staff had to barricade themselves in a room to escape the relatives of a young woman who died.
“We want the presence of the army in the hospitals and we demand the convening of the Public Order and Security Committee,” demands Antonio De Palma, national president of the nursing union Nursing Up, who reveals that “he had never registered in the last 10 years, such a brutal and exasperating escalation of violence.”
In August alone, “we counted 34 episodes of violence, physical and psychological, over 31 days! The reorganization of permanent law enforcement posts by the Ministry of the Interior is essential” because “until today” there are no police officers at night in any health establishment,” he said in a press release.
One of these attacks took place last Wednesday, when some of the staff at the Riuniti hospital in Foggia had to barricade themselves in a room, after about fifty relatives and friends of a young woman who died during an operation entered an operating theatre to attack them.
The video of the event, in which health workers are seen lock the living room door with desks and drawers, while some are bleeding, immediately went viral on social media.
Prosecutors opened an investigation after doctors and nurses said they feared for their lives and that received “death threats”while the Undersecretary of Health went to Foggia to promise a greater state presence and harsher penalties for attackers, according to local media.
“Violence against health workers is unacceptable. The latest images from Foggia go beyond the limits. “We need a united reaction from all political and social forces to defend those who work every day in the National Health Service,” said the Italian Federation of General Practitioners.
The Nursing Up survey reveals that “in no Italian hospital, after midnight, is the presence of police officers and only, in some cases, external night patrols of security guards guaranteed today, completely abandoning healthcare professionals in the potentially most critical schedule“, its president explained in the note.
The union proposes that the most sensitive areas of the emergency room be close to external accesses“by creating a clear separation between waiting rooms, with family members, and treatment rooms, in the same way that metal detectors could be installed because it is not possible for weapons to enter hospitals.”
“The hospital door is always openthe only one that citizens find available 24 hours a day. We are the most exposed point”, says Paola Caporaletti, director of the emergency department of the Riuniti in Foggia, in an interview with “Il Messaggero”, where she calls for “an alliance” between staff and patients because “whoever attacks a doctor, attacks himself.” in addition”.
