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Several nurses, a radiologist specialist, doctors and other professionals. There are 12 of them who yesterday alone, June 26, formally terminated their relationship with the Modena Local Health Authority, a sign of a drain of professionals that does not stop. At least for a year now. Professionals who have said stop to their employment relationship in public health, many of them with permanent contracts, with experience. Leaving gaps in the already deficient staff of Modena’s public health system. Gaps not only in numbers and in the professional and specialist skills that have long pushed public companies to resort to external consultancy with service contracts to private cooperatives and to resort to the provision of temporary work. For healthcare consultancy, we read in the latest Local Health Authority budget, spending in 2023 exceeded 10 million euros, settling at 10.7 million euros.
To these must be added the costs for non-healthcare consultancy. In 2023 the Modena Local Health Authority spent 2.1 million euros on this budget item.
In a vortex that, as far as staffing is concerned, seems to have no solution. The increasingly difficult working conditions for healthcare workers in the public system, both in terms of salaries but also, above all, due to increasingly heavy workloads and with little possibility of enjoying holidays and permits, often leads to voluntary resignations. Often towards an increasingly competitive private sector, also thanks to the increased use of external professionals and structures by the Public Local Health Authorities. The search for personnel within the rankings seems increasingly difficult. The use of the legislation passed to deal with the Covid emergency, through the inclusion of specialists, to find directly hired personnel, even if with temporary contracts, is increasingly frequent.
And where there is no availability, we resort to external cooperatives or to the number of hours that is budgeted each year for the use of temporary staff.
And this is how spending increases but without there being any response in structural terms regarding staffing. The staff that is hired is often precarious (there is a recent document which certifies that at the Cau di Fanano, in the impossibility of acquiring staff from the rankings, a specialist doctor was hired for six months). A scenario with strong critical issues that explode with the arrival of summer where, in order to guarantee holidays for staff, already stressed by very heavy shifts and a widespread difficulty even obtaining permits, the same staff are forced to do the impossible.
‘The plan to eliminate the waiting lists further burdens the services required of the already exhausted staff’ – says Giuseppina Parente, provincial representative of the Fials union who we meet at the union’s information stand in front of the main entrance of the Modena Polyclinic. ‘To cover the summer holidays, staff will have to replace themselves by doing double shifts and additional services. The Region is asking for an increase of 25% more in the basic benefits to begin to dispose of the waiting lists that have accumulated not through the fault of the employees but through the fault of this failed political management of President Bonaccini and the Regional Councilor Donini’.
Gi.Ga.
