Il Paradosso degli Infermieri: vittime o complici?

A wind of frustration is spreading through the corridors of Italian hospitals, a now palpable discontent that painfully clashes with the daily dedication of nurses. A cruel paradox is taking shape: those who embody the essence of care and assistance, irreplaceable pillars of the healthcare system, find themselves trapped in a spiral of economic impoverishment and professional devaluation, while their legitimate demands are systematically ignored.

The purchasing power of nurses is shrinking year after year, eroding the fair economic recognition that should accompany a profession of high emotional, physical, and intellectual intensity. Meanwhile, legitimate demands for rights—leave, holidays, mobility, access to private practice—crash against corporate walls of silence and denial.

And the contrast becomes unbearable when looking at the medical class: allowances up to 30,000 euros per year in case of renouncing private practice, privileges that sharpen the sense of disparity. A system that creates favorites and outcasts, leaving nurses to fight not only against fatigue but also against injustice.

The numbers don't lie: some of the heaviest workloads in Europe, among the highest hours worked, and among the lowest salaries. The allowances seem like a mocking consolation for professionals considered—only on paper—intellectuals. A ski instructor, classified as an intellectual professional, can earn up to 38,000 euros a year: much more than a nurse who works nights, holidays, under constant stress, with the risk of lawsuits and compensation for thousands of euros.

Yet, in this scenario, what is most surprising is the persistent trust in a union system that has governed the sector for thirty years, impermeable to the cries for help from the category. While doctors identify with strong and cohesive unions like Anaao, Cimo, Assomed, nurses fragment their forces among generalist unions, unable for 30 years to really make a difference.

Until the category becomes aware of its own power, until it understands that change comes from concrete choices and actions, nothing will change. 

The latest RSU elections, which reconfirmed the hegemony of unions distant from the nursing reality, herald another three years of immobility and loss of purchasing power.

But right in this dead end lies an opportunity. The next three years must become a laboratory of grassroots organization. Every nurse, in their own field, has the power to contribute to the construction of a cohesive, strong, category-specific union, free from sector logics, able to:

• demand salaries in line with the OECD average,

• obtain adequate allowances and recognition of exclusivity,

• guarantee freedom of mobility and private practice,

• obtain recognition of the strenuous nature of the profession and of career advancement through a meritocratic system.

The road is long, but in three years it is possible to turn the situation around. Continuing to support a system that has shown it cannot change is no longer just a mistake: it is complicity.

It's time to wake up. To unite. To demand respect, dignity, recognition.

Vincenzo Parisi - Nursing Up Executive