Beds closed: the summer plan starts in hospital

The summer plan of reducing beds to allow staff to enjoy their holidays is starting tomorrow, 1 June, at hospitals in the Sette Laghi area.

The plan is designed to take account of the physiological reduction in scheduled work, particularly in surgical operations, which occurs in the summer, and which can be seen not only on the surgical wards, but also in other types of admission and in intensive therapy.

In particular, for the service in Varese, which includes the three hospitals of Circolo, Del Ponte and Cuasso, about one hundred beds are planned to close. “These account for 10% of the total number of 970 beds,” the hospitals said. The fall will be greater in the month of July and will have repercussions on the work of the casualty department, which is always congested.

However, after the summer, all of the beds will open again, and another 16 will be added; the additional beds will be in the departments of Haematology (2 extra, for transplants), General Medicine II (8 extra) and Psychiatry.

A significant change is the work of the new department of Subacute Care, which opened last December and which will maintain its number of 30 beds throughout the summer. Equally important is the work of Sub-intensive Care, which has 10 beds, which will drop to 6 during July and return to the full number in August.

Looking in more detail, there will be no closures in Cuasso Hospital, and at the Del Ponte, the reception capacity will be reduced by only eleven beds in Gynaecology, from the middle of July until the beginning of September, to coincide with the reduction in scheduled surgical work.

For the same reason, a number of beds will be closed temporarily in the surgical area on the second, third and fourth floors of the main hospital building at the Circolo, corresponding with the reduction in operating room hours. The reduction in scheduled surgery will also make the summer closure of 4 beds in Intensive Therapy possible.

None of the closures will affect the psychiatry area, which will, in fact, already have 6 extra beds at the Circolo, in July, and the internal medicine area will suffer only small reductions: on the fifth and sixth floors of the main hospital building, where all of the main internal medicine departments are housed, about thirty beds will close, out of a total of more than 210, distributed over the two floors.

There will be no significant closures for any of the other sectors, with the exception of the Day Surgery, which will suspend its activity from 15 to 23 August.

Concerning the service in the Verbano area, about twenty beds, out of a total of 237, will close; here too, this will correspond, above all, to the reduction in the scheduled surgery.

And about fifty beds will close in Tradate Hospital, but almost exclusively during the months of July and August.