Safety of care: Italia is turning its attention to telemedicine and community care homes

‘Together with the regions and risk management experts, we are building a robust, modern risk prevention and management system that is capable of learning and improving. This is the aim behind the launch of work on the National Patient Safety Plan, which is being led by Agenas’s National Observatory for Good Practices in Healthcare Safety. The Plan is modelled on the World Health Organisation’s Global Patient Safety Action Plan, adapting it to the Italian context.” The announcement by Health Minister Orazio Schillaci comes on World Patient Safety Day, which focuses on one of the major challenges: chronic diseases, which are the leading cause of death and disability, accounting for around 74 per cent of deaths. Among the leading causes of death are cardiovascular diseases, with nearly 18 million deaths a year; cancers (over 9 million); chronic respiratory diseases (around 4 million); and diabetes (1.5 million).

“The figure that should give us pause for thought is the 1.8 million preventable deaths across Europe, especially now that we have all the tools at our disposal to significantly reduce the mortality rate from these conditions,” warned Schillaci.
The European Plan – launched in 2021 and due to run until 2030 – focuses, amongst other things, on transparency in communication with patients, the safety of clinical processes and medicines, the prevention and control of infections and antibiotic resistance, and patient safety in primary care and during transfers between hospitals. These are crucial objectives, particularly when one considers the scale of hospital-acquired infections – between 400,000 and 640,000 a year – which, in our country alone, are attributed to around 20,000 deaths annually. But in general, Schillaci is keen to emphasise, ‘Italia boasts significantly better figures than the OECD average in terms of avoidable mortality. This is an achievement of which we should be proud and which must spur us on to do even better to ensure safe, high-quality care for everyone’.

In our country, at least a thousand sentinel events are recorded each year, reported to the Ministry of Health via Simes – the Information System for the Monitoring of Healthcare Errors (Simes) – which collects reports of incidents from across the country. This ‘prototype’ will be built upon in the Patient Safety Plan announced by Schillaci, which is expected to result in a continuously updated platform. Meanwhile, work is underway on training, as Maria Rosaria Campitiello, Head of the Department of Prevention, Research and Health Emergencies, points out: the Ministry “is taking action and investing 11 million in research and training related to simulators, robotics and artificial intelligence, to train doctors, healthcare professionals and specialist trainees to make care safer”, she announces.

This challenge – which, with the reorganisation of local healthcare services aimed primarily at the 24 million people with chronic conditions – is inevitably being tackled outside hospitals and acute care facilities, and focuses on the implementation of the community care homes established under the NRRP, which are still being finalised. And where care will also be delivered via telemedicine, in the form of remote care, remote consultations and teleconsultations.

Tools that are also useful for ‘flagging up errors’ and standardising treatment approaches, ‘Digitalisation, telemedicine, data sharing, the Electronic Health Record 2.0 and a synergistic commitment between the Ministry of Health and Agenas, alongside proactive collaboration with the regions, have finally enabled us to start producing evidence that allows us to identify where certain pockets of inefficiency lie”, emphasises Francesco Saverio Mennini, Head of the Department of Planning, Medical Devices, Medicines and Policies in Support of the National Health Service at the Ministry of Health.