Ospedali alla deriva, intervento del Nursing Up

To the Mayor

To the citizens

cc to the AOU workers  Ferrara

Hospital adrift! Health risk for patients and healthcare staff at the Cona Hospital.

The health of our nurses is at risk of burnout and as a result we expect an increase in accidents and/or illness due precisely to the fatigue that inevitably leads to a drop in attention and all this will also have repercussions on patients, assisted by tired staff, humiliated by an arrogant nursing management and a general management that is deaf!

Nursing Up has been denouncing the serious staff shortage for years, writing letters to the General Management of Cona, requesting meetings, highlighting how the shift system is crazy, but the laconic responses from this management are that everything is fine and that they (good if not excellent, editor’s note) have done everything in compliance with the rules.

Maybe it is in compliance with the rules but the only certain thing is that we have reached the absurd, now the managers locked in their ivory tower continue to produce procedures that border on madness and that provide neither quality nor safety for either the patient or the nurse.

Procedures that probably in the minds of the managers, who in all likelihood no longer remember what it means to be pragmatic and above all to work on the front lines, believe that just by writing it they have solved the problem!

How can a ward with 48 beds and ONLY, I emphasize ONLY, 3 (three) nurses at night without support staff (OSS) be resolved with a procedure? And always an additional procedure for the management of the “covid bubble” or rooms dedicated to positive people, how can it be effective if the management is always done by those same 3 poor nurses? How can they guarantee the best for the 48 patients present? How can it be declared that this is quality or patient-centered care?

The reality is that we must stop making delirious and inapplicable procedures (just to normatively save the manager) and we must review the entire Cona system

Studies are clear, and Nursing Up has been asking for at least 6 years, to reduce the risk of mortality in patients or the damage caused by the system, there must be 1 (one) nurse for every 6 patients in the “basic” wards and citizens must be aware that for every additional patient the possibility of error and even disastrous consequences for the assisted patients increases significantly.

So, instead of writing procedures, we need to hire/stabilize many, many nurses and even more OSS because it is unthinkable to neglect hotel and basic care.

It is mandatory that these hires follow a serious plan that truly gives relief to healthcare staff who have been understaffed long before the pandemic thanks to reckless business-oriented political decisions that have everything to do with anything but the centrality of the citizen.

It is necessary to change the approach in the hierarchical relationship, we are overwhelmed by unedifying stories from workers who suffer from superiors, which has now become more authoritarian than authoritative, increasingly threatening rather than open to dialogue and listening.

It is essential to restore a relationship of humanity and professionalism, management cannot only impose from above, it must know how to listen to every single worker, must know how to value people and must come down from the ivory tower. In this regard, as a union, we suggest an exercise used in psychology with role reversal: for 30 days the nursing managers, who are healthcare professionals before being managers, cover a nurse’s shift and let’s see how they apply the “resolutive” procedures they have generated.

It is essential to favor those who work on the front lines with more substantial remuneration and therefore stop creating favorites and outcasts, the fund money must be used to seriously increase the pay of these workers!

The public must know that despite this management, even though the hospital is adrift, with many captains and no helmsman, the healthcare professionals of Cona will always carry out their work for the citizen with science and conscience, but the situation is not only critical, not only dramatic, it has truly reached collapse.

Ferrara July 16, 2022

Regional Manager Emilia Romagna Nursing Up

Francesca Batani