by Francesco Palmeggiani, Virgilio De Blasis
11 LUG –
Dear manager,
the serious situation of the first aid and emergency-urgency services is the most striking and dramatic manifestation of the crisis in the NHS. Citizens, not finding adequate answers to their health needs in the territory, identify the PS as the only gateway to diagnosis and treatment. It is the consequence of short-sighted policies that over the years have made hospitals the only outpost of public services, desertifying the territory, weakening prevention and neglecting training and personnel needs in a guilty way.
All the weight of these wrong choices inevitably and increasingly falls on the operators now “in extinction”, exhausted by endless shifts, frustrated, overwhelmed by health requests and bureaucracy, victims of aggression that are the signal of a conflict between citizens and operators artfully favored, a symptom of a concrete risk of social disconnection solicited by the media campaigns to delegitimize public workers. The causes are certainly to be found in the wicked political choices that, in the worst of the neoliberal economic perimeters, over the years have deliberately defined and dismantled the public to favor the private sector in the mystification that, from the right and left parties, proposes the illusion of an impossible collaboration between public services, which produce health, with private ones, which seek profit.
The policies that the Government and Regions have been implementing in recent months do not foreshadow structural solutions and do not go beyond some summer emergency measures. Considering the gravity and complexity of the situation, we believe it is necessary to open a great common reflection, a constructive confrontation which, starting from the recognition of the value of trade union relations, as also proposed in the contractual platform Fp Cgil Doctors and SSN Managers, works on research of shared solutions that are of emergency and immediate application, but inserted in a context of long-term structural reform.
It will be necessary to act on several levels that intersect in a perspective of system intervention, from the organization of integrated services of the territory with the hospital to streamlined processes of staff recruitment as part of a real extraordinary hiring plan, up to the reform of the training courses and employment relationships with a view to uniformity and governability of services, also with the overcoming of the conventions of general practitioners and outpatient specialists and with the re-internalization of outsourced services.
Even the Ministerial Decree 77 on territorial assistance does not give any answer in this sense, conditioned in the bud by the multiple corporate interests of the professional orders and harnessed in the plots of a framework focused on structures, construction and digitization, but lacking resources for personnel and management models built with the social partners in the interest of public health and citizen participation. Let’s stop the indecent haggling that falls on the professionals of the PS: between economic indemnities and the recognition of strenuous work we are losing sight of the complexity of the system to the advantage of partial and superficial answers. It is necessary to act in a structural way on the overflow of requests, on waiting lists, on the lack of beds as a cause of hospital bording, on the strengthening of prevention and territorial services and of course on the professional, contractual and economic enhancement of all operators who from the territory to the hospital are succumbing under the weight of the crisis of the emergency urgency.
There are no easy shortcuts and there are no miraculous measures. We feel a strong sense of responsibility and the need for seriousness and skills. We are confident that we can all sit around a table in a common effort to identify the best solutions to a very serious crisis that risks compromising the social stability of the country and the very survival of the National Public, Universal and State Health Service.
Francesco Palmeggiani and Virgil De BlasisNational Executive Fp Cgil Doctors and SSN Executives
July 11, 2022
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