The nurses at the Residence are not only defending our legitimate work and professional interests, which should be understood by anyone, but we are defending a quality care model that benefits the people we care for, our elders. To give an example, in our residence we have not carried out a massive screening of PCRs on residents and workers for more than 3 months, if we request our own machine to do PCRs, as they already have in some residences, it is to carry out periodic screening and detect cases prematurely and isolate them, and not wait until dozens of people are infected with a fatal outcome.
If we request a geriatric care training plan, it is to improve the quality of life of the people we care for, not ours.
If we request one more nurse, it is to reinforce the afternoons and weekends, which will be detrimental to our personal lives, but it will improve the weekends of our elders, which are, in the end, the citizenship we serve. If this pandemic has confirmed something to all those responsible for social services, it is that the established staff ratios for these centers are totally insufficient, and decrees are already being prepared to expand them.
Even a professional career is not a claim of our own that we have invented, but a legal mandate since 2010, for all public workers who have already enjoyed for years in most administrations, even in private companies such as Marina Salud, and that when it is achieved it will not only be for us, but for all municipal workers.
The government team has given an arrogant, authoritarian and rabid response to our demands, involuntarily revealing its aversion to our group. They have already forgotten what workers went through between the walls of the residence during confinement, they never really knew it. In these last three weeks, they have not even been able to pick up the phone to inform us of their efforts, but in less than 2 hours they have sent a statement to the press saying that our demands do not conform to current reality, instead, their Salaries that rose 25% last year and those of their senior positions that also increased, they do adjust to the current reality.
They intend to give an individual response to this collective conflict, but they should know that nursing does not work individually, but rather as a team, and as a team we are claiming, united by the bond of the difficult moments that we have lived. We have been doing our best for a year, so that our elders get out of this with the least possible damage, while politicians only give us their reproaches. They seem so far from reality that they forget that perhaps one day they too will be dependent and need care, and they want it to be worthy and quality care, like the ones we try to give every day with our best effort.
And why are you doing the indefinite strike right now, which is now when the elderly who care for the pandemic need you the most ???
Go and go with the tale of good people to the other side that what you do has no name