“‘Ambushed’ is a term that honestly mortifies any type of worker. Generalizing simply puts everything on the same level. If anything, there is a need for a serious reconnaissance of the staff and a possible relocation for the skills acquired; we have had our say on this several times and we can only be happy about it but at this moment there is a need to provide answers to the needs of citizens and above all to recruit healthcare personnel. It would be appropriate to think about extra-regional mobility to be able to bring back all those colleagues who can no longer bear the cost of living in other regions and who would like to return to Calabria. Use existing rankings to give workers oxygen. Fausto Sposato, president of Opi Cosenza, goes into the merits of the controversies of recent days. And he tries to indicate the best path. “First of all we must say that using the term “ambush” in healthcare does not seem appropriate because in the collective imagination we think of someone who does not want to do anything. It’s not exactly like that. To be fair, however, it must be said that many healthcare personnel were used in other tasks due to a lack of administrative staff but that today, after some time, they have become indispensable for that service”, clarifies Sposato. If anything, according to the president of nurses, “companies should be asked to change or modify the profile of this type of staff who carries out a different job compared to the hiring profile”. Even in different categories that probably do not belong to the healthcare role. Why does this happen? For Fausto Sposato, the reason is obvious: “many have limitations because we have a category of elderly healthcare workers, especially nurses over fifty-two: this is the national average. Therefore the occurrence of some limitations becomes normal” , admits the president. Not so much to defend the category but to “protect those operators who have real limitations”, for which it would be enough “to do a serious reconnaissance of the staff and relocate them, changing their profile”.
The Opi is convinced that, if this were to happen, it would be discovered that “we will have less need for administrative staff, less need for technical staff but more need for healthcare personnel, nurses, doctors, healthcare technicians and support workers”.
The underlying gap remains: “almost eight thousand fewer public health workers. Nurses? More than three thousand are missing to also be able to guarantee home care and be able to implement the provisions of ministerial decree seventy-seven and the PNRR to open community hospitals for example”. Also because the “staff is tired, we reiterate it once again”, notifies the president of the Order. “Tired not only from the workload but also from the attacks they suffer from patients and relatives of patients. But also of those people who turn to hospitals and then lash out, encouraged by those who see public health workers as the only ones responsible for this degradation. Nurses have always been on the front line. Nurses will continue to be in the front row but nurses are still looking for answers today to what are the new paths to be activated also in hospitals. We have nurses who have managerial skills, who could manage many processes and make sure to recover other professional figures. We expect to be called to the tables to be able to have our say too”, is his hope. First of all, in any case, “everyone should put themselves in their place, respecting the skills acquired which today are also an asset for the company itself”. Lastly, we would like the users who benefit from the skills and services of healthcare professionals to have greater respect for those who, at that moment, are trying to provide answers to the patients’ needs and support the multitude of requests from relatives”.
