To the President of the Emilia Romagna Region
Governor Stefano Bonaccini To the citizens
To all healthcare professionals
Hospitals adrift! Health risk for patients and healthcare staff throughout the region.
The health of our nurses, midwives, and OSS is at risk of burnout and as a result we expect an increase in injuries and/or illness due precisely to the fatigue that inevitably leads to a drop in attention and which will inevitably also affect patients, cared for 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 various General Managements, to the Prefectures, we request meetings with ministers and senators.
Crazy shifts, skipped rest, holidays while managers locked in their ivory tower continue to produce procedures that provide neither quality nor safety for either patients or professionals.
There are situations in Emilia Romagna where the nurse/patient ratio is dangerously high, far from international evidence which speaks of one nurse for every 6 patients in the wards.
Where is this quality or patient-centeredness that is so often talked about?
International research is clear, and Nursing Up has been asking for at least 6 years, to reduce the risk of mortality, infections, bedsores, and antibiotic resistance it is necessary to have one nurse for every 6 patients in the "basic" wards and it must be clear to the citizen that for every additional patient the possibility of error and even disastrous consequences for the assisted patients increases significantly.
An investment that translates into quality but also savings of millions of euros in antibiotics, dressings, medicines, hospital days and funerals.
So, instead of writing procedures here we need to hire/stabilize many, many nurses and even more OSS because it is unthinkable to neglect hotel and basic care.
It is pointless to go looking for staff abroad and maybe pay them three times as much when in Italy we have the best professionals courted by all European nations.
It is mandatory that these hires follow a serious plan that truly gives relief to healthcare staff who have been working understaffed since well before the pandemic. Disastrous choices, business-oriented political decisions that have everything to do with anything but the centrality of the citizen.
It is necessary to change the way of hierarchical relationships, we are overwhelmed by unedifying stories from workers who suffer from their superiors, which has now become more authoritarian than authoritative, increasingly threatening rather than open to discussion and listening.
It is essential to restore a relationship of humanity and professionalism, management cannot just impose from above, they must know how to listen to every single worker they must know how to value people and must come down from the ivory tower, in this regard we suggest as a union an exercise used in psychology with role reversal for 30 days: 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 people!
The public must know that despite this management, even though the hospitals are adrift, with many captains and no helmsman the healthcare professionals of Emilia Romagna will always carry out their work on the citizen with science and conscience but the situation is not only critical, not only dramatic, it has truly reached collapse.
Immediately close the open rankings, stabilize those entitled, hold new competitions.
Nursing Up says no to recruiting staff from abroad.
Regional Manager Emilia Romagna Nursing Up
Francesca Batani
