10050 hospitals of excellence for women

not to do with women but a sort of health care subject so rather than start another new thread ...

apparently a couple on holiday found themselves one late afternoon with a sick child...high temperature in fact... being a Sunday chemists were closed so they found out the one that was on call that day and the husband set off to go there and buy a thermometer to measure the child's temperature... it was closed but there was a number on the door to ring... chemist would not open and sell a thermometer without a prescription.... husband finds out the address of local guardia medica and pops there to get said prescription...closed... no number... decides that he should go to local hospital and ask a doctor there to fill out one... easy enough and the prescription is filled with the words urgent printed on it... forgot to say the chemist had stipulated how it was to be filled...

husband gets back to chemist and on to the phone again... chemist not happy that the man has had script filled properly tells him he has to wait outside until a private vigili comes and views said script and telephones chemist to say it has been filled correctly...

three hours later vigili arrives...who can luckily read...phones said co-operative chemist and informs him that it is signed by a doctor and has the word urgent... chemist agrees to come...and arrives two minutes later and gives husband thermometer who goes back to wife and child....

i know...why didn't they take child to hospital.... well they know like the UK that everyone has been told to respect hospital emergency treatment and not to abuse system...so they were trying to be correct in that sense...and what do you do after you have got the prescription...and been told the vigili, a private firm paid by the taxpayer, will arrive shortly ...after the first half hour you are torn between giving it another five minutes or going to the hospital again with the child...

all this happened in a coastal resort here in abruzzo... giulianova... not a centre for massive robbery of chemist problems... indeed of any high crime problems at all...

anyone want to visit this chemist shop its the comunal one on via trieste in giulianova... the vigili had to get there from Mosciano... not exactley close by...

This is when I feel very lucky to live 8mins drive away from our own small A&E unit at Montegiorgio hospital, open 24hrs a day everyday,I have had reason to use it myself and had a wait of 5mins. How worrying for the couple with the sick child, especially in a foreign country, if in doubt, especially with a child go straight to the hospital. I still dont know how they manage to keep it open in this rural community but am grateful that they do.
A

Last Easter we were staying just up the coast from Giulianova. In the middle of the night my husband became very ill with sickness and diarrhoea. Our experience was just the opposite adriatica. An exhausted Doctor was available, based at a medical centre at Giulianova. He said he worked locum because there was no other work available and it was clear he put in a lot of hours on the night shift. He gave me a prescription. (My husn=band was too sick to leave his bed). I went to the on duty chemist (it was the small hours of the morning). I had to post the prescription through a two way letter box (there are problems with drug adicts and robberies), so I never met the Chemist but simply picked up the medication from the same two way letter box. If I had not reassured the Doctor that I could inject my husband with the prescribed medicine, he would have made a "house call"and done it for me. I have twice been in hospital in Italy and praise their National Health systems to the hilt.

That's a terrible story about the sick child - ridiculous really, but I have to agree with Noble, the Italian health system is pretty good. The A&E is abused though (husband works there, and he comes home with stories of "I've got this sore throat which I've had for 3 weeks" etc etc) but I think that is only because the GPs work few hours and you often have to queue a long time, and people get exasperated by it.

these people were actually locals from Teramo and the story is published pretty well as i wrote it in English in a magazine we get in the city here for free each month called Citta... doesn't have a web site though... so cannot post the link up...

i agree about hospital service in general... although its easy enough living in some areas ... that in general we as non Italians inhabit outside of major cities to disregard some of the problems... Abruzzo thanks to its regional president and various other crooks associated with him decided to rob the health system here of several millions of euro... and with national government insisting on books being balanced many regional health systems are delaying treatments to save money...especially the more costly ones...

however all i can say is that the story highlights what is a problem with national rules being implemented thoroughly and blindly.... say as in football matches here... before the stadium was moved out of the city centre every other Saturday and e used to have all roads around the stadium sealed off and a helicopter flying over head... bars had to close within a certain radius... now Teramo being a relatively small city basically was unable to function... as the parameters were aimed at larger stadia ... apart from that there was no history of crowd trouble here in any case... Teramo not having a very good team ...to say the least... in any case

to go back to hospitals... the Teramo hospital fell down on its security measures in the report, it had no guards on the entrances and not enough patrolling the grounds... so in my original posting it would have got more stars if armed guards and dogs had been in evidence... however it is an extra cost that is easily and sensibly avoided in the case of Teramo... it basically does not have those sorts of problems and the administrators have obviously decided to ignore the more stupid rules to spend the money on treatment...

which brings me back to the giulianova story.... the point being made in the story was that yes there should be rules... but these need to be applied with a certain degree of common sense... the husband spoke Italian and was local...could obviously explain himself well enough, the pharmacist lived a minute away and could easily have verified things himself ...whilst it was daylight... but rules say do it this way ... i am sure on another day with another pharmacist it would all have been different... these people take lots of money for doing there turns at either the guardia medical or the pharmacist open... some do it very well...most... others not... but isn't that the case everywhere