The efficiency in the ordinary hospital bed management in Italy: an in-depth analysis of intensive care unit in the areas affected by COVID-19 before the outbreak

Abstract

In the first months of 2020 an increasing number of individuals worldwide are infected by the coronavirus disease 2019 . A particularly severe diffusion of the virus has affected Italy and in particular its northern regions. This is resulting in a high demand of hospitalization with a particular attention on the intensive care units (ICUs). Hospitals are suffering the high degree of patients to be treated for respiratory diseases and the majority of the structures located in the north of Italy are or are going to be saturated. This has led the actual and past national and regional governments to be heavily criticized for reducing in the past years the number of beds, in particular those located in the ICUs across the country. 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 efficiently manage these structural facilities allowing hospitals to treat patients without the risk of having an . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review)

Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: From transmission to control with an interdisciplinary vision

“…Important geographical differences in access to ICU facilities were found in Europe, due to the national resource allocations for public health and the distribution of health-care facilities. In Italy, for example, the progressive reduction of budget allocated for the hospital in the last years caused the decrease of ICU beds, with the impellent necessity to transform some available hospital beds into ICU units ( Pecoraro et al, 2020 ). Then several works in literature have proposed new strategies to manage the demand for ICU beds ( McCabe et al, 2020 ) and planning for COVID-19 health responses.…”

Spatial Inequity in Access to Intensive Care Unit Beds at Regional Level in Italy

“…The severe diffusion of COVID-19 that has affected Italy and in particular its northern regions since the beginning of March 2020, resulted in a high demand of hospitalizations in particular in the intensive care units (ICUs) [1]. While all hospital wards struggled with an exceptional workload, the ICUs were particularly stressed given that the majority of them in the northern part of the country saturated or nearly saturated their capacity [2]. At the moment, even if the second wave started more than five months ago (i.e.…”

“…In this perspective, one of the main challenges would be to rapidly and efficiently assign and reallocate appropriate resources, such as medical professionals, equipment, hospital beds to face overload and saturation [2]. Usually, the main indicator adopted to determine the capacity of hospitals is limited to the number of beds per 100000 inhabitants, computed at regional level.…”

The impact of natural disasters on the spread of COVID-19: a geospatial, agent based epidemiology model

“…We use published data for the spread of COVID-19 to parametrise our model, and compare the outputs of the most realistic scenario (no eruption, lockdown initiated) to real world daily infection and fatality data. We use the number of ICU beds in Campania region (427) as a measure for hospital capacity [27]. Due to the large population size in this scenario (over 5 million individuals), we adapt the code to run on a 24 core Haswell E5-2680v3 processor node of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.…”