“AAA looking for social and health workers” (Oss). This is how the appeal launched by an RSA in Trentino, in the upper Val di Non, which has so far always fallen into thin air because “there is no available staff”, tells time.news Salute Elisa Gelsomino, psychologist and deputy director of the RSA ‘Stella Montis’ in Borgo D’Anaunia, 55 km from Trento and 20 from Cles. So much so that “a month ago we found ourselves afraid of not being able to guarantee the service, and we had to eliminate all the paid beds”. Thus, while waiting for ‘candidates’, RSA has created an intensive training course for auxiliary workers: “it is not the same as having qualified personnel, but we hope for further training”, she reports.
“And then they say that the health workers flee from the public and are ‘stolen’ by the private sector”, jokes Gelsomino, who is currently acting deputy director of RSA, a social cooperative with 52 beds in agreement with the provincial company for health services (Apss) of Trento and 8 paid private places. “We began to have problems when there were the first suspensions of no vax operators – he says – and perhaps also because of our geographical position, a bit isolated. But until now, for 30 years, we had always worked with local personnel, so with zero turnover and people who only left for retirement. For some years, however, due to a change in schools for Oss, we began to have the first problems and then, after these two years of pandemic, we had a series of layoffs, displacements on the territory and on the various public companies, and now we are afraid of not being able to guarantee the service “.
The fully operational structure has 26 Oss operators, therefore qualified personnel, but has also reached 30, to which 6-7 nurses are added, “at the moment, however, we only have 21 Oss, and a worrying summer scenario because we will have to organize holidays and shifts. This is why we had to close the 8 paid places, because, in the absence of staff, we cannot be under the parameters and there would be a lack of service “.
“So far – remarks Elisa Gelsomino – we have never worked with generic or auxiliary operators because we had Oss qualified personnel. Now, however, this type of operator is not found, despite we offer a contract, that of the Autonomous Province of Trento, which is a little higher to the national one of cooperatives, and usually we give a fixed term for 6 months or a year and if the conditions are right we transform it into an open-ended contract “. But to what is this deficiency attributable? “For a number of reasons – the deputy director reiterates -: in addition to the suspensions for the unvaccinated, the changes to the training courses in the provincial Oss Schools, also to the fact that no one, evidently, wants to move to the territory. With the pandemic, moreover, all those who have been ‘recalled’ from the territory, perhaps they were in the ranking, have in the meantime made the competition and have remained in the health company “.
“For this reason – he says – we decided to create an intensive one-week training course for auxiliaries, paid for by us as a cooperative, hoping to find available people who can become generic and then over time we give them a hand to train as Oss. Obviously – he underlines – we always talk about generic personnel, who therefore must always be in shift with an Oss, who cannot do certain tasks but at least helps to cover the service and to respect the provincial parameter that is required of us. At the moment we had 23 questions of enrollment, we will take 15 members and then of these we will certainly hire 5 for the summer with the idea of keeping at least 3 and the prospect of making them grow “, he concludes.