Nursing Up: Echoes of Nurses’ Protest in the UK Today

Nursing Healthcare: “Echoes of today’s legitimate protest by UK nurses reach us directly. And if our British colleagues, to whom we express our strong support, with their basic net salary of about 2,300 euros, plus bonuses and overtime, demand a radical reform of their wages, it strengthens the causes of our battles, in Italy where our net salaries are 1,400 euros, without bonuses and overtime, It does not even reach the wages of the youngest English nurses.”

Rome: «At this moment of great turmoil and upheaval british nurses, who have legitimately carried out, in these hours, what may be defined as an unprecedented strike, not only of the United Kingdom, but of the entire healthcare context of the Old Continent, we feel the necessity of expressing our strong sympathy to those of our colleagues who of such courage have decided to fold their arms, demanding an appropriate raise In salary, in relation to cost of living change and inflation. What’s happening in the UK, Antonio De Palma, National Chief of Nursing, begins It could not fail to touch us closely.

It cannot fail to make us feel involved and embedded in a legitimate ‘drive’ for change that we don’t just feel in our own country. If we are seen as inevitable, and if we live somehow the same aspirations as our British colleagues, it is because a disproportionate increase in basic necessities, and not just energy bills, as we have reiterated many times, risks shifting. Concretely we are the Italian nurses in the new poor, with a net salary of 1400 Euros per month, which comes in little. more than 1700 for some only, Depending on overtime, bonuses, etc. Our salaries are among the lowest in Europe. It is a discipline that, paradoxically, we are the backbone, with our skills and those specialties that make us so desirable in other European countries towards which for years a real and justifiable journey has been running.

It is for this reason that we fully understand the mood of UK professionals and share the building blocks that, from the early hours of this morning, have excited tens of thousands of colleagues. And to think, continues De Palma, that the net salary of a nurse in Great Britain, and we are talking about the basic salary, amounts to 2,000 pounds, or about 2,300 euros net, not counting overtime and bonuses. An economic situation which is profoundly different from ours but which nonetheless appears, in the eyes of British society, not only by health professionals but also by citizens, to be profoundly unfair in relation to the local cost of living.

The unprecedented hit took effect in the UK It inevitably reminds us of our case, that of the health care reality with a gap of 80,000 nurses, and with an average much lower than the European case, in the relationship between nurse and patient and nurse and doctor. The Italian press also gives extensive coverage of nurses’ agitation in the UK, as it should be, highlighting that the local government has so far rejected a demand for a 19% pay rise from union representatives, calling it “unsustainable”. Fillings were held in front of major government hospitals, including Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London. The desired salary increase of 1,400 pounds seems remote, at least for the time being, while an agreement will be sought for a salary increase of 5% above the rate of inflation, which in itself is very high. We ask ourselves, and it is our duty to do so, what will happen in Italy in the coming months and what may be the echoes of protest that will be sniffed, in other European countries, where nurses live in conditions more precarious than their British colleagues, where the disparity between doctors’ wages has reached And rewards other professionals in this sector to very high levels of inequality », concludes De Palma.