After almost two years spent fighting against Covid in the trenches of hospitals, about 33 thousand doctors, nurses and other health workers are stabilized. The solution for those who some have renamed the “angels of Covid” – hired in a frenzied hunt to find the staff who, especially in the first months of the Covid tsunami, were tragically missing in hospital wards – is currently in a dense dialogue between the Ministry of Economy and that of Health to get to write the rules, so far left blank, to be included in the maneuver.
Stabilization in the budget law
The proposal strongly supported by the Minister of Health Roberto Speranza who in the emergency has always thanked the health personnel is a new breath of fresh air – after the increase in maneuvering of the NHS resources which will rise to 124 billion in 2022 – after years of blocking of turnover, cuts (-45 thousand operators between 2009 and 2018) and a ceiling on staff costs calculated on 2004 costs to be subtracted by 1.4%. This latter ceiling could always be eliminated in the budget law, as Minister Speranza himself has said several times.
An audience of 33 thousand operators
The stabilization should concern, as mentioned, about 33 thousand operators, including a few thousand trainees, young doctors who have completed their training directly in the trenches.
The requirement that should be accepted in the maneuver is that of having had a fixed-term contract between January 2020 (the beginning of the emergency) and June 2021. A requirement that would concern approximately 33 thousand operators. The cost should be around 500-600 million, which is the gap of extra resources needed to transform us into permanent contracts.
Those excluded from the maneuver
In reality, the audience of “temporary workers” hired during the emergency is much wider as reported in recent days by Fiaso – the Federation that represents the managers of Asl and hospitals – and is 66,029 operators out of the 83,180 recruited since January 2020: these 21 thousand are doctors, almost 32 thousand nurses and almost 30 thousand other operators (laboratory and radiology technicians, biologists, health assistants, etc.).