ANCONA «After all, what man hasn’t loved a nurse?», complete with a winking smile. New gaffe with a sexist aftertaste for the Northern League health councilor Filippo Saltamartini, who spoke yesterday during a conference of the Order of Nurses of Ancona. Precisely with this macho phrase, the holder of the proxy tried to break the ice with the audience. Which, as expected, he didn’t appreciate the unfortunate exit. Not even the guests who shared the speakers’ table with Saltamartini seemed to have appreciated it, remaining impassive while murmurs arose from the audience. “But what is he implying?” someone asked.
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Macho phrase, the reactions
In the room it then fell to freezing, so much so that the commissioner was forced first to try to patch up (“the nurses who take care of you in the hospital” he tried to explain), then to cut it short. «But now, without gender discrimination, let’s go on» he hurried to close, passing from greetings to his intervention. Almost forty minutes of speech during which, however, the echo of those words continued to resound. Moreover, for the commissioner it is not the first questionable utterance made in an official capacity. In fact, already in May 2022 he had ended up at the center of controversy for one of his sentences that commensurate the degree of intelligence of individuals with the size of their skull and consequently, even if it is not yet known which one with the female genital organ from which they were born.
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Saltamartini, the speech
Putting aside the botched incipit, however, the audience made an effort to listen to the commitment of Saltamartini and therefore of the Region towards health professionals, in particular nurses. The central theme turned out to be that of training, on which Palazzo Raffaello say they are proud to have invested. “We have funded about 160 scholarships in addition to the state ones,” explained the commissioner. The goal: to attract young people and save hospitals from a catastrophic generational turnover.
Resources
Nine million over three years will then be used to purchase telemedicine devices. A thought also for the health workers hired with Covid and now dealing with expiring contracts: “We have given a mandate to keep them all”. For many, however, there are only temporary contracts in sight, for two or four months. Not surprisingly, then, that many flee Italy. “Italian nurses are among the best trained and least paid in Europe,” explained the president of the Doric Order of Nurses, Giuseppino Conti. And for this they go to Germany, England and Spain.