Husband and wife leave their permanent jobs in Friuli and move to Veneto: “We never felt like an asset, only envy”

Ciro Antonio Francescutto, a well-known and appreciated diabetic doctor throughout the province and beyond, and his wife Francesca Romano, a physiatrist, leave the health company.

From tomorrow they will work, with Sumai contract of outpatient specialist (fixed-term, but renewable) for sports medicine in the hospitals of Portogruaro and San Donà di Piave. Farewell to a safe place for someone who is “less welcome, more precarious and less profitable”.

In a long letter, Ciro Francescutto explains the reasons that led him to leave the Friulian healthcare system, starting with the case of his wife.

“If a part-time mother of three is taken away, the choice of privileging the family is legitimate: rather, the meaning of the proclamations in favor of women should be reconsidered.”

Francescutto, after 15 years at the hospital in Maniago, recognizes in the choice to leave «a personal and systemic defeat. I had believed that it was possible to include in the “system” the modification of lifestyles (diet, movement, smoking) as a tool for the prevention and / or therapy of some diseases, in particular those I was dealing with, namely diabetes, obesity, hypertension and cholesterol.

I soon realized that it was my illusion, as the thing did not interest the “system”. I resisted years of indifference and hostility, until I realized that I did not want and could no longer be part of a pharmacocentric system centered on the “pill”, in which my role was increasingly similar to that of a pharmacist, caged between the bureaucracy and rigidity of the company, in which my freedom and my identity as a doctor succumbed ».

In the “system” «I have never felt like a resource, on the contrary I have often felt the weight of indifference or envy for my way of being or working».

Above all for these reasons he has chosen to change region and field of work: “I’m not leaving because it suits me or because I have found a more stimulating job: I will work less, earn less, I will have a contract with fewer guarantees, I will take care of a less stimulating subject.

I am leaving only in protest at how the health company has considered me as a professional in recent years. If there is a shortage of doctors, it is therefore not only for economic reasons, but often because they are induced to leave ».

On Friday he closed the door of the clinic in Maniago for the last time: «After years of resistance I could no longer bear the weight of the absence and the distance from the company. I would go back more than happy. But if the Company wanted it and it wanted me ».

Ciro Francescutto refers to the Serracchiani reform. «In April 2014 he came to Maniago to explain to the Maniago people how their hospital was transformed into a hospital unit“ for their good ”, therefore with the closure of medicine and emergency room and the transformation of the 36 beds into an experimental form. Moreover, there was a decades-long experience in a closed country hospital ».

It would have been the pilot project for the Region with the strengthening of the outpatient offer, proximity and initiative healthcare. «Only I took the floor to confirm that the project seemed far-sighted, even if I hoped that it would not be carried out in too much haste and that the political part of the territory was also involved.

I wrote the same things the next day to Serracchiani. For having dared to write to the governor I attracted the antipathies of the company management: unfortunately, however, exactly what I had feared happened ».

The medicine was closed, the country hospital was closed, «but no alternative project was started and we found ourselves in two doctors managing a complex RSA and the diabetes clinic. Then the colleague was absent, so for about six months I carried on the Rsa and clinic in solitude, until at the end of the year following my absence due to pneumonia, when I returned after 3 weeks I discovered that I had been removed from office ».

Municipalities and professionals “were cut off” from the reasoning on the future of services in the northern district: “The company regulation that gags the expression of employees on the one hand is a legitimate protection of the company, on the other it removes the possibility of affecting improvement of his own reality and little by little a person who does not feel “his” the work in which he is employed, works with increasing demotivation ».

The doctor remembers Maniago’s second place, after Cagliari, in a national competition in 2017, “Prevention flows”, a project he carried out in his spare time: «Everyone talked about it, except the health authority I worked for».

Only the deputy mayor accompanied him to collect the prize, 10 thousand euros which should have made Mount Jouf an open-air gym, enhancing the paths for mountain-therapy purposes. “It is a pity that the 10 thousand euros have never been made available and still lie intact in the company coffers”.

Why does the territory of Pordenone suffer more than others from the shortage and the flight of doctors? “For three factors. Udine and Trieste have a city behind them, Pordenone even with its dynamism does not have the “quantitative” strength of the big city. Secondly, unlike Trieste and Udine, Pordenone does not have a university to which a higher level healthcare is necessarily connected.

Not that excellent specialists are lacking in Pordenone, but very often they are people linked to the territory for personal reasons: it is difficult for an outsider who wins a competition to be able to last over time without aspiring to a professional leap.

Third reason, the fragmentation of the public offer of hospitals, disputed between various bell towers. Pordenone, San Vito, Spilimbergo, Sacile and Maniago, the Policlinico in Pordenone (which offers many services in agreement with the public), the Cro: they are too many for 300,000 inhabitants ». The strengthening of local services “rightly proposed by Serracchiani has remained a dead letter”.

In the next few years «we will see the rise of the new“ hospital ”in Pordenone, which seems to have been specially sized so as not to overshadow the current ones. In my opinion, all this denotes the limits of a prospective and planning political vision ».

The conclusion: «I am 49 years old, I don’t think I am a phenomenon, but I think I have gained a fair amount of experience: if the system, rather than trying to find a point of agreement, has preferred to replace me with a pensioner, I think it is a legitimate but questionable choice. Many other colleagues before me have suffered the same fate ».

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