The two-year agreement for the management of the Pascoli and Villa Serena municipal nursing homes, which have always been considered the flagship of public and social assistance for the elderly in the municipality of Livorno, will expire on September 1st. A management which, however, according to the unitary trade union acronym USB can and must be improved precisely in view of the drafting of the tender for the assignment of the new tender. According to Usb, in fact, “things are as they are described and as a trade union present and active within the RSAs we believe it is right to express the operators’ point of view”.
Starting from the procurement system and the “need to open an internalization process with the Municipality and Local Health Authority – explains Usb in a note -. The professionals who work in the structures have all the Oss and Osa certifications as do the educators and other figures , but they receive far lower salaries than their local health authority colleagues. We are talking about hundreds of euros less, rather than the minimum wage… Unfortunately this is the procurement system: outsourcing implemented in past years which has paved the way for private management of public structures. A reversal of the trend is needed”.
Everything arises from the belief that “the improvement of working conditions is the necessary condition for the improvement of the quality of the service, an important service on which there can be no savings – says Usb -. In the RSAs we notice a shortage of materials as well as not all the departments have replaced the old lifts, not to mention the interventions to deal with the high summer temperatures which have reached worrying levels in recent years and the absence of dedicated areas for breaks”.
Lastly, there are strictly trade union issues on which, also through the writing of the new notice, we could intervene. “It is not possible that there are operators hired on a part-time contract who systematically, for years now, work full-time with dozens of additional hours – they conclude from USB -. It is not possible that the national contract is not respected and not paid the allowance for dressing (suit time) and on-call, the latter replaced with an undefined ‘availability’ which is not paid”. Finally, “as far as the ASL commission is concerned, we would like to point out that even today several guests who present significant problems, including psychiatric problems, are instead welcomed as a basic module, thus expecting lower levels of care compared to their real needs. For all these reasons we have already opened a discussion with the municipal administration in this phase of writing the new tender”.
