Health, Bertolaso's mission to South America: looking for nurses and not only for Lombardy

The trip to South America by Lombardy's Welfare Councillor Guido Bertolaso to forge agreements to get nursing staff, in particular from Paraguay and Argentina, into the region's health facilities is causing controversy.

From Buenos Aires, Bertolaso explained that his is not just a mission for the Pirellone region. "I am not here to represent Lombardy alone, but I came after agreements with the national government," he explained to Rainews 24, defending the decision to forge agreements for "bilateral cooperation projects" so as to have nursing staff without creating problems for local healthcare "because we know that nurses are a rare commodity everywhere in the world by now".

"My goal," said the former head of the Civil Protection, "is not to go shopping, or rather 'looting' as other countries do, such as those that border Italy and attract Italian nurses with salaries that we will never be able to match, we are talking about salaries 3 or 4 times higher than in Italy. With these agreements, the idea is to create 'a training course so that they can increasingly improve their skills and direct experience in the field and then they can return to their country and contribute to raising its technological, organisational and professional level by being replaced in Lombardy by other contingents'.

For the nurses' union, Nursing Up, Bertolaso's tones are 'incomprehensible' and 'triumphalist'. According to president Antonio De Palma, "it is like claiming to cure serious pneumonia with a cough syrup, and then being surprised if the patient dies in the end". Italian nurses 'are indispensable' and it is 'unimaginable not to think of rebuilding our healthcare system without making concrete use of the strengths we have at home and without putting in place a plan to restore the appeal of our profession and create an indispensable generational turnover'. In Lombardy, 'they only think of hiring foreign health professionals, presenting their project as the panacea for all ills', but above all 'dangerously disregarding what the regions themselves have requested in the guidelines for the new contract', that is, 'that the priority is to make up the shortage by acting on the contractual lever for all those already working'. And then, concludes De Palma, "how long does Bertolaso think these operators will remain in Italy, when just a few kilometres away from them they will always have the welcoming Switzerland, ready to give them twice the Italian salary?".

Criticism also comes from the opposition. "Instead of importing nurses from abroad, we must curb the flight of nurses," according to the leader of the PD group in Lombardy Pierfrancesco Majorino. "The trade unions that have harshly criticised Bertolaso's choice are right," he says. Importing professionals from abroad is paradoxical and certainly does not solve the problems of the chronic lack of personnel. They are looking for professionals in Paraguay and Argentina, who are certainly valid, but without any knowledge of our health system, while nothing is done to stem the flight of Italians abroad'.