Abstract
Since the end of February 2020 a severe diffusion of COVID-19 has affected Italy and in particular its northern regions, resulting in a high demand of hospitalizations in particular in the intensive care units (ICUs). Hospitals are suffering the high degree of patients to be treated for respiratory diseases and the majority of the health structures, especially in the north of Italy, are or are at risk of saturation. Therefore, the question whether and to what extent the reduction of hospital beds occurred in the past years has biased the management of the emergency has come to the front in the public debate. In our opinion, to start a robust analysis it is necessary to consider the Italian health system capacity prior to the emergency. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse the availability of hospital beds across the country as well as to determine their management in terms of complexity and performance of cases treated at regional level. The results of this study underlines that, despite the reduction of beds for the majority of the hospital wards, ICUs availabilities did not change between 2010 and 2017. Moreover, this study confirms that the majority of the Italian regions have a routinely efficient management of their facilities allowing hospitals to treat patients without the risk of having an overabundance of patients and a scarcity of beds. In fact, this analysis shows that, in normal situations, the management of hospital and ICU beds has no critical levels.
Highlights
The number of individuals infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus causing COVID-19 emergency, is dramatically increasing worldwide [1]
While all hospital wards are struggling with an exceptional workload due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the intensive care units (ICUs) are stressed given that the majority of the hospitals in the northern part of the country are saturating their capacity
It is important to note that the occupancy rate is computed considering the number of beds available in each region in 2017 and the number of hospitalized patients affected by COVID-19 and does not take into account patients admitted with other pathologies [33]
Summary
The number of individuals infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus causing COVID-19 emergency, is dramatically increasing worldwide [1]. The first person-to-person transmission in Italy was reported on February 21st, 2020, and led to an infection chain that represents the largest COVID-19 outbreak outside Asia to date. As of 29th of March 2020, Italy is the second most affected country in the World and the first in Europe, with more than 97.000 confirmed cases according to the Italian Department of Civil Protection [2]. What is still an open question is the reason why the spread of this. Hospital intensive care unit bed management in Italy
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