The anger of the white coats: "Left with broken machinery and without medicines, due to too many debts the suppliers did not even deliver the medicines anymore"
by FEDERICA ANGELI
Seven thousand five hundred patients rejected in ten months at the IDI due to broken and never replaced machinery. Cancer patients forced to move to other hospitals because the drugs needed to cure them weren't there. "Too many debts, the pharmaceutical companies no longer delivered," says a doctor. Scientific research, which Italy once looked to for important developments (from melanoma to psoriasis) on skin diseases, has stopped five years ago: "The regional funds intended for research have flown elsewhere". The story of the collapse of one of the internationally renowned dermatological centers is told by the doctors who, "despite everything that was happening" continued to work even without salaries. "We continued our work - declared the head physician of one of the IDI departments - at a rate of 400 visits a day, without instruments, without medicines, without the equipment indispensable for making important diagnoses, especially for cancer patients".
And it is with regret in their hearts, but also with anger, that the white coats of the Istituto Dermopatico dell'Immacolata tell of how they watched helplessly, despite having denounced what happened within the walls of the Aurelio hospital over the years, at the transformation of the "Jewel Idi" into a "scrap".
"We had to assist without being able to intervene - said a doctor of Radiology - to the decline. Since October we have had a stopped mammogram, two spiral CT scans (the newest, the latest generation ones) and an angiograph broken and never replaced. There was no money and the contracts had not been honoured. And this inevitably lowered the level of assistance". "Cancer treatments have been interrupted – this is what an oncology doctor is talking about now – because the pharmaceutical companies, never paid, suspended the distribution of drugs and we had to divert terminally ill patients to other facilities ". The waste of Father Franco Decaminada, managing director of the IDI until last year and now investigated by the prosecutor of Rome for embezzlement, were there for all to see.
"Time and again, picking up the eid grievances
