“I am a doctor enrolled in the Order, for three years I have been working in the emergency-urgency in Veneto. Every day I take Covid patients to the emergency room, but there I have to stop: unfortunately, I cannot work directly for the State ”. Artes Mameli, a 28-year-old Albanian doctor, is coordinator of young doctors for theAssociation of doctors of foreign origin in Italy (Amsi). She is also part of a large “white army” of doctors and nurses which remain outside the wards, even if the gusts of the second wave slam on the glass doors of the hospitals, and every region laments their desperate lack. “In reality we work on it, but always remaining on the margins, through cooperatives or privately, always with VAT. And like me, thousands of other doctors ”.
And here is the paradox: since the beginning of the emergency the Regions complain about the lack of health personnel, but they do nothing to use the foreigner they already have. Rather than use it, they go looking for it abroad. They speak Italian, they are enrolled in their respective professional registers and they are full-fledged doctors and nurses. Are they less capable than the Italian ones? Are they less willing? Do they have C-series degrees and qualifications? None of this, the exclusion of foreign doctors is due to a piece of paper: the requirement of citizenship Italian. “It’s surreal but that’s the way it is – Artes denounces -. Regions and Ats systematically exclude foreign professionals, despite the government having ordered one derogation from the first wave. The truth? In Italy, unfortunately, bureaucracy and discrimination are still dictating the law ”.
Our country thus discovers, in the most dramatic season since its postwar period, the price of xenophobic choices of the last 20 years and of the lack of immigration policies and integration qualified. Myopia, bureaucracy e prejudice they are preventing even today, with hospitals close to collapse, from recruiting in the public a workforce that would be ready to enter the ward. To slam the door in his face are the administrations of the Asl and hospitals that feel the lack. They are the ones to announce competitions with the requirement for hatching of Italian or European citizenship and they do so as well against the law, why the Care Italy it had opened the doors of the National Health Service to foreign professionals.
L’article 13 of the March decree allows the temporary hiring – until the end of the emergency – of health personnel not belonging to the European Union, provided that he / she holds a residence permit that “allows you to work, without prejudice to any other limit”. However, from the regions and their territorial health emanations a rubber wall. It happens wherever reinforcements would be needed: in Bergamo, Civitavecchia, Matera (the tender is still in progress), in Umbria. Up to the case of Piedmont which, with 10 calls all for doctors of Italian citizenship, prompted three medical associations to publicly report non-compliance with the law. Among these, Amsi, whose president is the Israeli physiatrist Foad Aodi, and since 2002 has been a councilor of the Order of Doctors of Rome. “We are experiencing a black page. Foreign doctors in Italy who could help their colleagues are an army of invisible people who find space only in the private sector or on the margins of the system. It has always happened, but that it happens while people are dying is unacceptable ”. Also because abroad, Berlin and Paris in the lead, we are working in the opposite direction.
The numbers
On the national territory they are 77.500, including 22 thousand doctors and 38 thousand nurses. Among the doctors, alone 5 thousand they work in the public as well 15 thousand they are hired privately (and, in clinics, often underpaid) and about 2 thousand they work as freelancers. Almost the 60% of them, therefore, work outside public health. This is the photograph, this is the problem. “In April, the government approved an exemption that would have allowed foreign doctors to be employed but it remained on paper. Regions do what they want, most of them do interpreted at will. Veneto, for example, preferred to look for sanitary ware in Romania rather than use those on its soil. And still not enough, because he is looking for 1300. Even Piedmont has done it. And we rightly denounced him ”.
The Piedmont case, the Emilia Romagna counter-case
The Cirio region is emblematic. Friday stayed with 10 intensive care places in its departments. Monday, in response, announces a “task force” to increase them. But at the same time it admits the lack of personnel to activate them, and opens up the possibility of employing resuscitation students. Yet it is the same one that with a resolution excluded all non-EU doctors, even if they are in good standing and pay taxes and practice the medical profession. “It is frankly unacceptable but it must be resolved once and for all by sweeping away discrimination.” The opposite case of Emilia Romagna demonstrates that there are no insurmountable reasons behind the exclusion. Right from the start, the Bonaccini region has bet on the contribution of foreign doctors. The day after the derogation included in Cura Italia issued ad hoc calls for their recruitment: Expression of interest in the temporary exercise of the health profession obtained abroad and regulated by specific directives of the European Union (in implementation of Article 13 of the Decree -Law of March 17, 2020 n. 18.).
The proposal: “Citizenship after 5 years”
The association had advanced a proposal. “Foreign doctors can make a difference in the Covid emergency. To enable their input we asked who have a work experience of at least 5 years in Italy be admitted to public competitions – says President Amsi – and that, after passing it, can begin his path towards citizenship. It is a solution that does not find hostility on the part of Italian colleagues because we are all aligned on the need to protect the qualifications of doctors regardless of origin or skin color. There is no downward competition, there is no competition between doctors. We are all aligned on paying them more and even the Italians agree in treating foreigners not as second-class doctors, who are used to plug holes in normal times, even ignored in the emergency rather than recognized. There is only one thing that distances us, and that is discriminatory politics. The Italians themselves say “enough”.
Germany and France, citizenship for merits of service
This is exactly what our neighbors across the Alps, Germany and France in the lead, are doing. Just today the French government announced its intention to accelerate the “naturalization of foreigners in the forefront who have made a fundamental contribution to the emergency “. Doctors and nurses but not only, including garbage collectors, cashiers. The Minister of the Interior anticipating a vademecum for the prefectures. Germany is also asking migrant doctors to help fight the coronavirus. Saxony, where data is the strongest, has opened the debate by launching a campaign that invites foreign doctors, starting with the thousands of Syrian refugees who have arrived since 2015, to come forward. “Anyone who can help get in touch”, says the slogan of the Leipzig Medical Association.
–
