“The nursing shortage is a complex issue, there are no simple solutions. It is obvious that today with less than 65 thousand professionals in the NHS there is a need to recruit nurses from abroad. However, this is not the only solution to stem a serious phenomenon, if we consider that between 2023 and 2033 as many as 90 thousand nurses will reach retirement age and that every year 500 leave our country to work abroad”. This is what Barbara Mangiacavalli, president of the National Federation of Nursing Professions (Fnopi), told Adnkronos Salute, on the occasion of the meeting ‘Challenges and opportunities of the nursing profession’, organized today in Rome by Fnopi and Crui (Conference of Italian University Rectors). An institutional discussion and an opportunity to illustrate the potential of the profession, the persistent critical issues and the crucial role played by university education in the future developments of the health system.
Added to the haemorrhage of nurses are the alarming data of graduates in Nursing Sciences, “which every year are on average 12 thousand compared to 14 thousand exits due to retirement age – adds Mangiacavalli – Therefore an evolution of the university training path is necessary and urgent, with specializations, which we hope will soon be a reality. We need to create conditions to make the nursing profession attractive for young people, to the extent that young people can fill their backpacks with skills and evolve in the workplace. Training must be increasingly adherent to the epidemiological and system data that tell us how the country moves and orients itself”.
Among the many requests of the Fnopi on the table of the Ministry of Health, there is “the recognition of the nursing profession as a demanding profession – underlines Mangiacavalli – because now it is not and for this reason it does not even have some legal benefits. Result? The vast majority of nurses do not retire because they have reached the age limit, but as soon as they have the possibility. Today, the nurse who enters the NHS carries out the same tasks in the same conditions and with the same salary for 40-45 years: his position is identical until he retires, minus some automatic increases linked to the contract. With university specialization, however, you can build a different career”.
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