Chiedono sacrifici in cambio di sacrifici. Operatori sanitari stressati.

The nursing category is made up of 77% women who should not have to choose between leaving their minor children at home, requesting unpaid leave, or even, as has happened, resigning.

We realize and are forced to denounce that once again, between the words (of our politics) and the “doing,” there is always a sea in between, an ocean in this case.

They ask us for sacrifices in exchange for sacrifices.
Rest breaks skipped, blocked holidays, blocked permits, permanent contracts delayed to make room for temporary ones, money announced, for many never received.

We share and support the requests for help from colleagues that reach us from everywhere, by the thousands.

We ask politics, all of it, to stop complimenting us and to work together with us, united, to find quick solutions and get out of this stalemate.

To intervene promptly, meeting all those colleagues, nurses, midwives, OSS, technicians, etc. who every day have to go to work with the thought of leaving their children alone at home because the school is closed or the class is in quarantine.

Next week the Support Decree will be made official, the Ristori 5, which promises new parental leaves, but will they be accessible to everyone? Only to red zones or will they also be extended to yellow and white zones that have classes or schools in quarantine, which are not few?

The new draft says that parental leave will be paid with a salary reduced to 50%, the measure will concern both public and private sector employees, who have children under 16, and no longer only up to 14 years old.
Furthermore those with children over 16 will be able to request leave but with zero salary.

When the possibility was given to abstain from work for a period of 15 days and then extended to 30, more than 400,000 people took advantage of it.

The alternation between leave and smart working also creates a disparity between workers who can access smart working and are paid 100% with covid-19 bonuses, and those who cannot, like healthcare workers, staying at home without pay or with a reduced salary, without covid-19 bonuses.

Covid is raging as never before, at the Spedali Civili of Brescia, for example, the saturation rate in intensive care has gone over 90%, despite the opening of new beds.

Our proposals? 

- The first could be to extend paternity leave and make it mandatory to take at least seven days.

- Give parents the possibility with jobs considered relevant for the system, to continue bringing their children to school. If teachers are also missing because they are engaged in distance learning, allow students to connect to distance learning from school instead of from home, so as not to interrupt attendance with their teachers, but at the same time allow parents to be reassured that their minor child is not alone at home but in a protected place like school.

In particular, and we will add this to every article, healthcare workers need a new contract outside the sector with separate bargaining and specific funds, dedicated only to us, and not spread to everyone. Too often, widespread disbursements fall on everyone, but it cries out for justice for those operators who do the heavy, dirty, and dangerous work.

We conclude with the summary of a beautiful speech by our President Antonio De Palma: «I think especially of our little ones, of those who have always experienced the difficulties of our work firsthand. They are the historical memory of what we live. They are used to our being “eternally” divided in half: when we are fathers and mothers, on the one hand, and “soldiers in the wards” on the other, intent as never before at this moment on saving human lives. Dealing with the difficult conditions of a job that often does not repay us for our efforts. And forces us into battles for contractual claims and greater respect for our dignity».

«All this tension, the absurd working hours, the physical fatigue we live with, we transmit to our children, in the little time we spend with them. “Divided with our other family" to whom we dedicate soul and heart: our patients.

That enemy that has taken away too many colleagues, fathers and mothers of children now left alone. In the name of a job we love, for which we fight every day».

«While the political class struggles between supposed renewals and measures that should revolutionize in terms of quality, the conditional is a must let me say, the nursing category, offering a more efficient service and hopefully protecting the world of healthcare workers, I say let's stop for a moment. Let's reflect in silence. Let's put aside for a moment the work problems, the papers, the contracts, the figures, the union battles.
And let's think of them: our children, because they are the “real heroes”, they are the ones who, more alone than us but always by our side, have fought with all their frail strength against an unknown monster. We nurses can be proud of them and of the innocent and unconscious lesson they have given us.