FLORENCE – Perhaps the certainty of having a new professional order very soon is not enough to give security to the 350,000 Italian nurses. Despite the promise of Welfare Undersecretary Ferruccio Fazio, and despite the fact that at the hospital level day after day the category conquers slices of responsibility, the most insidious problem seems to lie in an internal contradiction in the nursing world. Where the precarious emergency has hit doctors in recent years, the public health service needs professionals on the nursing front. Instead, as emerged at the national congress of the Federation of Ipasvi colleges in Florence, at least 60,000 units are missing from the NHS. We will hardly see mass hiring; on the other hand, we will be able to see situations of under-payment|); there are 30,000 foreign nurses, generally non-EU, in health care. Not all of the nursing world is aware of its peculiarities. Thus the president of the colleges Annalisa Silvestro recalls her colleagues: "We must have more awareness of our skills and abilities". In fact, it was easier for the Italian health system to split into twenty with fiscal federalism than to launch a reform of the professions ready since 2003. So Silvestro sets up his relationship on two parallel tracks: the deontological code renewed in 51 articles which confirms the existence of a second pillar of health care, of a peculiar nursing act, of a second welfare half that governs health care alongside the clinical half; the second track is governance: the healthcare half of healthcare must make it clear that in an operating unit of a hospital, doctors and nurses can have profoundly different workloads, "there can be an Uo with medium clinical intensity and high assistance intensity", and in these cases the needs of nurses must be redesigned. Finally, the "provocation" to the medical world: "waiting times in emergency rooms are still long also because for the visit and any service it is necessary to wait for the availability of a doctor, however many things could be carried out by a nurse with high professionalism, quality, and in complete safety for the person-assisted". From the top of the SWG survey which underlines the excellent popularity (70 percent) of the category (on the other hand the Italian-structures and Italian-waiting times relationship is bad, the family doctor is good) Silvestro specifies: «We don't want to become doctors; we are and want to be the second assistance pillar of the service». A service that is a major public work, and employs 6 percent of the population to produce 11 percent of the gross domestic product. Among the themes of the congress - during which one hundred "good care" projects developed by nurses throughout Italy were collected, including local medicine; as for the hospital, the nurse seeks collaboration on an equal footing with the generalist in the teams, but the roles need to be better designed: and having given up on healthcare homes must not lead to the loss of contact between the two professionals, (mm)
Medical Courier of 18/03/2009 N.6 – 12 MARCH 2009 p. 2
AF
