The odyssey of the doctors at San Gerardo in Monza: hired by the private sector, forced into a public competition (with zero seniority)

Millions of debts which are being investigated by the Court of Auditors, mediations covered by “absolute secrecy” at the top levels of Pirellone to try to repay them. But also a rollercoaster for the staff of San Gerardo in Monza, the former pediatric hospital and center of excellence transformed into a Scientific Institute for Hospitalization and Care (IRCCS) in […]

Millions of debts which are being investigated by the Court of Auditors, mediations covered by “absolute secrecy” at the top levels of Pirellone to try to repay them. But also roller coaster for the staff of San Gerardo in Monza, the former pediatric hospital and center of excellence transformed into a Scientific Institute for Hospitalization and Care (IRCCS) in the Moratti era, where the private sector reigns supreme and the State repays the debts, an affair revealed by a joint investigation between Il Fatto and L’Espresso. The public-private ircocervo born from one management experimentation which is born unbalanced in the balance of power between private and public partners also turns out to be a very bad beast for the personal who works there and who, finding himself in the middle, ended up moving from a public contract to a forced employment in the private sector, and then returning to the public with a competition whose final result is the elimination of the length of service which makes him fall back into the salary penalty compared to other colleagues from which he escapes.

A perverse spiral that has lasted for years and is still ongoing, as he explains Susanna Cellari (in the photo), official of the CGIL Brianza Public Function – “The Mamma Bambino Foundation was born in 2005 as an experiment between public and private which, however, should have lasted a few years, but instead it continued for 17 years, still being ongoing. As CGIL we have always been against these experiments which create inexorably unequal economic treatment between staff working side by side carrying out the same functions. The staff involved is not small, we are in fact talking about around 280 people, including doctors and non-medical staff. Over the years we have had to intervene several times with decentralized agreements for medical staff, introducing economic differentials to limit the gap with public colleagues, acting on many items not covered by the private contract such ascontractual holiday allowanceexclusivity, specificity and assignment indemnities, furthermore we also had to sort out the contractual classification of non-medical staff”.

Before the advent of the IRCCS at San Gerardo in Monza, all the functions of the maternal and child department in the various departments, including hospitalization and research activities, were the responsibility of the Mamma Bambino Foundation. Now they have been absorbed by the IRCSS, including staff who have been seconded to the IRCCS, whose pay slips are issued by the Foundation and to be then reimbursed by the IRCCS. The three-year plans to cover the needs are established by the Region and there is an agreement for also absorb the staff of the MB Foundation which, however, must take a public competition, the only gateway, which in some cases initially assigns a preferential score to those who have already served at the Foundation. The competitions started in 2023 (gynecologists, nurses, midwives and OSS), the one for pediatricians was published in recent days and the one for neonatologists should be held in 2025.

However, there is something further paradox in this story, which overturns the cliché of “private is nice because it pays more”, in fact the medical staff hired privately waiting to return to the public, in order to continue to operate in an area that they had contributed to creating with levels of excellence very high, over the years he has had to suffer significantly lower salary levels than his colleagues hired at IRCCS with public contracts as Cellari continues to explain: “Now that they are forced to return to public contracts they will find themselves with all seniority has been eliminated accrued at the Foundation regarding the exclusivity allowance, resulting in economic penalties of approximately 10,000 euros per year for those with seniority between 5 and 15 years and of approximately 15,000 euros per year for those with more than 15 years of seniority. As CGIL we are also intervening in this umpteenth mockery to the detriment of the staff, we have in fact asked the leaders of the Lombardy region to take responsibility of the decisions taken over the years on this experimentation, finding a solution that allows these doctors to be recognized for the correct seniority of service carried out up to now, finally putting them on a par with their IRCCS colleagues. If this doesn’t happen our concern is that they might miss many of these professionalsspecialized in disciplines of excellence such as pediatric oncohematology, who could decide to go elsewhere, without major problems given the lack of pediatricians throughout the national territory, tired of this continuous penalization and this would cause great damage to the entire healthcare system in Brianza ”.