What to do to improve the protection of fragile patients
May 28 is National Relief Day. The intervention of Alessandra Servidori
On the occasion of National Day of Relief, which occurs on Sunday 28 May, the National Federation of Orders of Nursing Professions ( Fnopi ) launches its proposals to improve care and care for fragile patients.
For Fnopi, palliative care, pain therapy and humanization are the three cornerstones chosen for Relief Day 2023 and the nurse is the protagonist. It is due to professional responsibility, but also due to the prescription of its Code of Conduct: for nurses, humanizing assistance is an indispensable value. Article 24 for palliative care prescribes that “nurses provide nursing care until the end of the patient's life. It recognizes the importance of assistance, shared care planning, palliation, environmental, physical, psychological, relational and spiritual comfort. The nurse supports the family members and reference persons of the assisted person in the final evolution of the disease, at the time of loss and in the mourning phase”.
NURSES AND HOME CARE: DATA FROM THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH
All this is already evident in what happens every day in assistance. The latest data from the Ministry of Health on home care (ADI), which is essential for terminally ill patients, shows that in 2021 nurses provided more than three times the number of hours of assistance and accesses per case of other health professions: over 100,000 terminally ill patients assisted, 70% by nurses with over 1.6 million hours of assistance and almost 2 million accesses.
THE SHORTAGE OF NURSES
Unfortunately, the shortage of nurses – at least 65,000 are missing, more than half of which for assistance in the area – has weighed heavily on assistance and for a self-respecting ADI that reaches 10% of the service provided by the current 4 -6%, as decree 77/2022 on the reorganization of territorial assistance in application of the Pnrr prescribes, thousands more nurses should be dedicated than those who can currently perform the service (even just fulfilling the prediction of the standard of a nurse of family and community every 3,000 inhabitants translates into a need for at least 20,000 professionals): due to the shortage, the time for each home access has been drastically reduced as a function of the increase in accesses and to allow professionals not to leave anyone alone.
The National Federation of Orders of Nursing Professions, in order to implement in practice a real quality assistance both from the clinical and relational point of view and the humanization of care, proposes to expand the experiences of Nursing-managed Hospices which have proven to be absolutely effective for the assistance.
RECOGNIZE SPECIALIZATIONS
It's time to recognize nursing specialties; in this case give space to the nursing profession on the management of pain therapy. In paragraph 83 of the 2023 Budget Law, it is expected to reach 2028 with assistance coverage of 90% of the population concerned and therefore it becomes a challenging and not impossible result.
The value of the nursing profession does not simply derive from the set of technical/scientific gestures that nurses implement, but from the relationship that conveys each gesture of care and from the meaning that derives from it and which, due to their quality, can make a difference. They enclose an even more precious value: they become the means by which it is possible to help restore or rediscover the sense and meaning of the time that remains, valuing every single moment that can continue to be filled with life. For nurses, a statement of their Code is a priority: 'time for relationships is time for care'”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/giornata-nazionale-sollievo-infermieri/ on Sat, 27 May 2023 05:06:09 +0000.