Italy's health care workers stage nationwide strike in protest at low wages
Max Civili
Press TV, Rome
On Friday, tens of thousands of nurses and non-medical health professionals walked off their job and staged a nationwide strike demanding improved pay and better nurse-to-patient ratios.
The industrial action had been called by a number of healthcare unions in response to the government's inaction that had followed another strike called in January.
Italy's nurses have been celebrated as heroes for treating desperately ill coronavirus patients often with little equipment and knowledge of the illness. However, today they feel forgotten.
About 450,000 nurses are currently employed in Italy, a country with a population of about 60 million people. According to a recent OECD report, the average gross annual salary for nurses is among the lowest in Europe while the ratio between nurses and the population is 6 per thousand inhabitants, against 18 in Switzerland and Norway, 13 in Germany, and 11 in France.
Privatized and commercialized, Italy's healthcare system has been thrown upside down over the past twenty years. A system in which private and public clinics compete for taxpayers’ money came into play in 1997 when Rome opted to decentralize the Italian healthcare system and give more autonomy to regional governments.
Lombardy is one of the Italian regions where the healthcare private sector is largely supported by public funding. It was also one of the worst-hit regions in Europe by covid 19 and the epicenter at the beginning of the European outbreak. Experts believe that Lombardy's fragmented health care system snarled the lines of command across the region throwing hospitals into chaos. That caused the deaths of thousands of people during the first wave of covid in Italy.
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