2023-12-16 03:16:00
hospital.doctors.nurses
Nursing Up: this is how Italian nurses live in Germany
Between 300 and 500 nurses leave Italian healthcare for German healthcare every year. From 2013 to today, 4,000 have landed in cities such as Stuttgart, Berlin and Munich. Over half never return to our country. Here is the investigation
Italian nurses flee to Germany. The Nursing Up investigation
«Our journey continues into the delicate reality of what, without exaggeration, can be defined as the flight of Italian nurses abroad. From our point of view, considering that every year the healthcare system in our home “literally falls apart”, with a real exodus of around 3 thousand professionals, the definition hemorrhage perfectly frames the situation we are going through. So let’s try to really understand how the European countries that select and welcome Italian nurses are organised.
Our magnifying glass concerns the first country ever to hire homegrown professionals. We are referring to Germany. The numbers and data from our survey come to us directly from the “Germitalia” project, connected with the German Ministry of Public Health. Germitalia operates on behalf of the Internationaler Bund, one of the largest German training-work institutions. Our investigation brings to light what can be defined as a true path of “new emigration” linked precisely to the trend of healthcare professionals. In the last 10 years, as many as 4 thousand Italian nurses have found work in the German public healthcare system. Over 70% operate permanently in Germany.
In particular, between 2021 and 2022, an average of between 300 and 500 Italian nurses per year, he chose Germany to build a professional path which, given the contents we are about to tell you, is truly light years away from the Italian one”.
Thus Antonio De Palma, National President of Nursing Up. «The managers of Germitalia told us in detail how a young Italian professional employed by a German public health system lives today, which has a shortage of nurses which in 2035 could exceed 200 thousand units. The recruitment campaign for European professionals is therefore a constant, and in first place in the selections are our professionals, whose educational background is considered far superior to that of a German nurse. Therefore, other European countries like us, continues De Palma, also experience the plague of staff shortages, with the only big difference that German hospitals are pearls of organization and structural renewal and that nurses’ salaries are quite different compared to to ours. Our investigation highlights that nothing is left to chance. After passing the recruitment selection process, the Italian nurse is projected into full language immersion courses that last 4-5 months. First of all, the professional must achieve a real knowledge of German, with a basic level of German defined as b1, which is essential for working. Only in this way will the professional be able to start being in contact with patients, but let’s be clear, almost everyone can do it, because they are put in the position to do so with intensive courses lasting 8 hours a day. Once you reach the next language level, B2, you get a basic salary of 2300 euros net, excluding bonuses and overtime.
In regions such as Baden-Wurttemberg, around the capital Stuttgart, Germitalia tells us, there are around 15 large hospitals with a huge presence of Italian nurses. The cost of living is not very high, certainly not higher than cities like Milan or Rome. The employment contracts are managed directly by the German healthcare companies, which also provide affiliated studios, fully furnished, for 500 euros per month including utilities.
It seems clear to us, therefore, that the Italian nurse who today works for example in the public hospitals around Stuttgart certainly does not experience a condition of economic hardship. In the first months the Germitalia program supports our young people in everything: up to the hiring with the first intermediate contract (linked to the achievement of the basic level of German, i.e. B1), up to the one of maximum responsibility (German level B2), our professionals also have free accommodation support and the language course is entirely at the expense of the German healthcare system, which has no intention of letting the Italian nurse escape, so over 90% pass the language tests because they have been selected to be part of of the system and to be put in the best possible condition to work and immediately support patients.
It seems clear to us, observes De Palma, that today there is an abyss of difference with what is happening in Italy, such as recently in Lombardy, where young South American nurses have arrived in the provinces of Varese and Como. We understand that most of them are completely new to Italian but will soon start working, and that there is no official language training program provided by the Region. Peruvians, Colombians, Argentines are apparently taking steps, local reporters tell us, independently and in different ways, to learn our language, even if it is certainly easier to get to Italian from Spanish than learning German from scratch. But in the meantime we understand that some of them have already started working between public and private healthcare in Lombardy.
In Germany, however, the German language path for our nurses is directly managed by native speaking professionals. No Italian professional will ever be thrown into trouble to plug the gaps of the lack of personnel, because without the necessary linguistic knowledge it becomes impossible to build a relationship with patients and with the rest of the healthcare staff. In addition, of course, to the economic wages, which are in fact very far from ours”, concludes De Palma.
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