Remarks by Prime Minister Edi Rama at first Albanian Nurses Congress:
Hello everyone!
Few seconds before taking the floor to address this event, I read a quote from Pope Francis I have never heard of: “If God were to be a man, He would have certainly been a nurse.”
An I thought what an incredible burden you shoulder setting out to work with the idea you could be the God on earth for those who desperately need your help and service and, on the other hand, you cannot help but think that for thousand reasons, either right or wrong reasons, the people in the healthcare system are subject to a very serious perception regarding the health service.
Of course, our health system comprises doctors, nurses and others who are a disgrace to their white uniform, but what I can personally testify – since in my capacity as a Prime Minister I have visited and inspected a few health service facilities and I have met not a few people of this system – that most of doctors and nurses are not as such.
The majority of them are women and men, girls and boys who wear the white uniform with dignity.
The truth is that if you happen to ask someone who, fortunately, hasn’t seen a doctor over years, he would definitely answer “you would die unless you pay in a hospital. However, you ask someone who received medical care for years, the answer is not definitely the same, and in many cases I am pleased to receive messages from ordinary citizens, who say medical care they receive in hospitals surprises them as no one asks them to pay in exchange of the service.
It doesn’t mean this is always and everywhere the case, but it absolutely means that of all investments we make, which are never enough for this system despite all the efforts we make to advance system reform, you and everyone working in the system remain the solid foundation of the country’s healthcare system.
If I were to use my modest knowledge and not so modest experience in order to classify the weight of stones of this foundation, the nurse is definitely the heaviest foundation stone for a decent health care system. There is a saying and you may know it: “Save one life and you’re a hero, save one hundred lives and you’re a nurse.”
Of course, here inside and outside this room one may find thousands of evidence of the extraordinary difficulties in doing the job, without being under the awful pressure of not just the difficult conditions and lack of proper instruments and equipment, but also the day to day job insecurity after years long in your workplace as a nurse as you could be made redundant and being replaced by not a more competent colleague, but by someone who probably had yet to touch any of the instruments.
Just as it has taken place beyond all the difficulties and beyond all the shortcomings of a sound process, which today is consolidated with teachers, the same will happen with nurses.
Never again the political parties will handpick nurses!
Never again will the political parties decide who will be employed and who will be fired job, who will be wearing and who will be taking of the white uniform.
This is a fundamental guarantee for the nurses’ dignity, as well as a guarantee for the job position, which will significantly increase the nurses’ motivation to take continuing education activities to improve knowledge and build essential skills to succeed in your medical practice.
Setting this basic criterion and going through the new Nurses for Albania Platform as the only nursing employment mechanism in the public health service structures has made us proud today in front of all those girls and boys who have been behind the doors for years and today are included in the system precisely based on their merit.
Some 13 thousand out of 16 thousand licensed nurses and midwives are practicing nursing professionals in the country’s health care system, whereas three thousand more nurses are currently looking for a job. These 3 thousand young nurses have but one choice, the one just like the initial group of 416 nurses who fared the best in the portal’s exam and are part of the nurses’ team now. There is no other way.
The merit-based employment is a tremendous challenge in this country. It is an extraordinary challenge. It is a challenge that the more I speak the more incredible things I can say. It is a daily fight with people of all categories and colours who are used to an old tune, including individuals within our ranks. When I say within our ranks I mean not only the ruling party, but also individuals in the state’s highest level structures. We are not acknowledging this fact not to sound great when we speak on TV and otherwise do something else. We say this because it is just and it should be done.
We should grant the right to work whoever is righteous and deserves to take up a job in a service. I am absolutely aware, I am more aware of all those who reproach, criticize, complain, because I know a lot more in the sense of information about what happens, there is still much happening due to the past inertia.
However, there are many reasons to be hopeful and optimistic we will succeed, because not 100 but just three years ago no one in Albania believed that this country’s students would ever enter university on merit alone, no one in Albania ever believed a day would come when a student, whose parents are poor and leave in an area far from Tirana, would be admitted to university based on a national level entry examination that cannot be manipulated.
This is what happens today.
Students today are admitted to the university without having to try everything – persuasion, bribery, a middleman. They now enter the university on a merit-based system.
The same is happening in 99% of cases of teachers.
But why is it 99% and not 100%?
Because a small number of them work currently on temporary contracts leaving room for subjective decisions and subjective decisions leave room for abuses. What is happening today is that the teachers’ portal, as well as the nurses’ portal will no longer be a mechanism, but a law and teachers and nurses will be employed according to the law and nobody else will decide who take up the job, but the grade points. Any new job position that opens becomes immediately available on your portal. Anyone interested can check the vacancies and apply for employment.
Of course, merit is the basis, but after picking the right people, you have to keep them and a lot of things are needed to stimulate them. We are committed and guaranteed the funding for the construction and reconstruction of 300 health care centres across the country, where women, mothers and girls in white uniform have been working in extremely difficult and miserable conditions over years.
It may impress many of the men here in this hall why I am mostly referring to the female nurses, but, despite the due respect for men, but it is not a secret I am increasingly inclined and as long as I serve in this post I believe and act fully convinced that as many as possible women should become part of the decision-making process in order to do things better in this country. Women are absolutely more serious, dedicated and much less corrupt than men in the whole system. So I urge men not to be upset with this bitter reality.
One of the things that needs to be done is to keep focused on the fact that the wages of nurses, which have increased considerably and I believe you agree – no need to say it loudly, because they would then say the gathering included state employees who are lying in chorus – should continue growing at any stage the budget makes possible.
In 2013, the average salary was much lower than today. Today’s salaries are much higher, but the tomorrow’s ones should be much higher. Because, if we were to refer to the past in its all aspects, including the healthcare system, we can state a lot have been done, but if we consider the future then nothing has been done yet.
Likewise, thanks to the taxation system we have introduced, those working in the healthcare system prior to 2013 know quite well that you receive an extra salary thanks to the lower income tax rate. You used to pay a 10% income tax rate but you now pay a much lower tax.
The government will do whatever it takes to introduce a new salary hike this year.
I am pleased to see the continuing education figures speak up for themselves, but I would like to conclude with the opening remark and quote Pope Francis: “If God were to be a man, He would certainly be a nurse.”
I would even say that if God were to be here on earth, He would have definitely been a nurse.
Without asking and pretending you to be the Lord’s incarnation on earth, I would beg you all to do whatever it takes to lend more dignity and make the nurse’s role more respectable, because it is of fundamental importance, not only to the healthcare service but also to a new breathing of the society.
There is saying: You treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you’ll win, no matter what the outcome. In this sense, this is the blessing to your profession, since you treat so many patients and you just win. Whereas it is my job’s curse that no matter how hard I try I keep always loosing.
Without pretending to compete with the Holy Father’s extraordinary quotes; I want to greet you all by saying: “If God were to be on Earth, He would have been a nurse. If Satan were on earth, he would have been in our Parliament.
Thank you very much!
