The reintegration of no vax doctors will not solve the staff shortage in hospitals. Here’s what you really need

The reintegration, decided by the government, of health personnel suspended for having refused the anti-Covid vaccination it will have a marginal effect on hospital staffing. Word of the president of the Medical Association. In the press conference in which you presented the decree, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni motivated the decision by explaining that “it allows you to take four thousand people still and put them to work, in a time of serious shortage of staff”. Even the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci, reiterated that reintegration “serves above all to counteract the shortage that is registered in the area”. Yet, according to Filippo Anellithe number one of the Fnomceo (the National Federation of orders of surgeons and dentists), health workers who do not yet have the vaccine “they are less than one per cent of the total and most of them are self-employed. They have no relevance in terms of the lack of staff in public structures “. In short, we are talking about four thousand professionals, who would have been reinstated at the end of December. But this is a drop in the ocean of 468 thousand professionals, including doctors and dentists, almost all of whom have fulfilled their vaccination obligation. “A number”, Anelli insists, “which varies every day since those who fall ill with Covid-19 are ‘vaccinated’ and at that point their suspension from work lapses”.

The executive’s decision is therefore an ideological move? “Today we return to an ordinary situation, ed it is legitimate to do so. But it is not fair to accuse the past government of excessive severity because when it was called to take a decision on the issue of health workers who did not get vaccinated mortality was very high. At that juncture Parliament has made an acceptable reasoning and it made the collective interest prevail over article 32 of the Constitution “, which ensures that no one can be forced to a specific health treatment except by law. “Then with the vaccines the mortality was almost zero”, continues Anelli, and therefore today it makes sense to review the norm.

The lack of doctors in many Italian regions is a well-known and denounced problem for some time, primarily by Fnomceo. What is the prescription that the medical order proposes to the government to try to resolve the issue? “First of all, we need to acknowledge that someone made a mistake,” says Anelli, who proposes a change of paradigm. “The programming, which is up to the regions, has been set in recent years on the availability of economic resources and not on the real need for professionals. The programming, on the other hand, must be done on real needs and only then will the resources be found. For example, if in resuscitation you need a doctor for every two beds plus a total of nurses and HOS, that must become the standard. And resources must be allocated on that. There is also an urgent need for an update of the rules that define the economic limits of reference for personnel expenditure within which healthcare companies can recruit (2004 wages amount decreased by 1.4%). To date, the fund is at a standstill, just as the training course for 2022 has not yet begun. Unjustified delays accumulate due to an excess of bureaucracy“. Not only that: according to the president of the Medical Association,”work needs to be made more attractive. Many colleagues leave for abroad, where salaries are better, and many others for cooperatives, where the immediate salary is higher and there are no service orders, so you can better organize your private life “. Not only more resources, therefore, (Italy is in the last places for the salaries of health workers), but also for the quality of individual life, which according to Anelli, is currently “unacceptable”. “Often among those who remain to work in the public an ethical reasoning prevails, a form of deontology that makes them accept long and exhausting shifts, the sacrifice of the family. Instead, it must be made a decent job. Yesterday Minister Schillaci stressed the validity of the vaccine, thanked the professionals and the orders: we are on the right track “, concludes Anelli. What now expects that politics will give answers to the urgent questions reported for some time by Italian health professionals.

• Enrico Cicchetti

• Born in the lands of Virgil in a sultry September 1987, he seeks refreshment in those of Aeneas. Al Foglio since 2016. On Twitter he is @e_cicchetti