Britain's young doctors are planning further protest strikes, following the very controversial ones in January. Their main grievance has to do with pay, with the prospect of cuts in overtime and weekend working rates. Things are less than calm in Italy, too. Britaly Post spoke by phone to Andrea Silenzi, Chairman of the Italian Young Doctors Association (AIGM). He told us that efforts have been made in Italy, too, to draw attention to young doctors' difficult working conditions. "The situation is in Italy is worse than in Britain, where our colleagues are protesting against pay cuts for night and weekend shifts. "Italy's problem is a broader, structural one. It has to do with the balance between the number of students graduating from medical college each year and the number of job opportunities. Our country has the highest proportion of medical staff per capita in Europe, but at the same time it has the highest proportion of elderly doctors in Europe." The result of the inevitable blockage is that many new graduates apply for recognition of their qualifications and set off to seek jobs abroad, a large proportion of them in the UK in fact. Then there are the cuts: €31 billion less, spread across just four years, under the Monti, Letta and Renzi governments. "To cope with this sudden shortage of funds, we've tried not to reduce quality of service too much, but have had to literally exploit our trainee specialists, extending their shifts well beyond what's normal, without proper overtime pay." A young trainee doctor at Padova's Ospedale Civile who also spoke to us by phone had some revealing things to say about this. "Until recently there were no limits on working hours for medical staff. Most people mostly thought that doctors are there to save the world and must always be ready to deal with every emergency. But then they realized that this is unsustainable and that there were very high suicide rates among medical staff. So the EU set a maximum number of hours that can be worked during the week. "But Italy just adapted by circumventing the rules: I get to the hospital at 7 AM and check out at 5 PM, but I stay on to work until 10 PM." Despite this chaos, Silenzi pointed out that the Italian health service can be described as efficient. This is reflected in recent international ratings, including the one drawn up by Bloomberg, which last year placed Italy in second position in the world after Singapore. Source
