Ricerc@Sapienza

The recent pandemic has caused primary healthcare services to change their traditional functioning in a short time frame. There is growing evidence, however, that while organisational changes to healthcare delivery have occurred to protect those that are more exposed (both among staff and patients), these may lead to indirect, potentially harmful consequences, particularly to vulnerable groups, as well as an unwanted lack of equity when considering the inclusion of such group of people. Two major critical factors have been related to the management of critical care accesses and the availability of healthcare operators.In case of pandemics or exposure-driven illness , unfortunately, health operators and medical doctors are the designated first victims, both due to their potential contagion risk, as well as to the ever increasing psychological burden and work-related stress. However, a series of effective interventions are possible in order to enhance the safety measure and protect the healthcare operators, mitigate their psychological distress, while caring for patients without decreasing their perceived quality of service and adopting all the possible inclusion policies. This project aims to develop and implement a comprehensive robotic solution to help physicians, patients and their relatives, and tackle the factors influencing the perceived reduction of the quality of service and care during emergency situations. The main purpose of the project is then to enhance and enforce the readiness of any healthcare system in order to cope with emergency situation, operator shortage (e.g. in case of present or future potential epidemics), as well as taking into account the most fragile portion of the population (elders, mentally or physically impaired people, etc..). In order to do so we aim to cope with the predisposing factors that could potentially endanger the healthcare system during an emergency situation or when the operators are overwhelmed by work.