Gianluca is an internal medicine nurse. He has been for five years and when he talks about his work he does so with the smile of those who identify with this profession and put their hearts and professionalism into it.
In his training, he has combined two courses of study, clinical training and health management, to be "an increasingly prepared and competent nurse who knows how to guarantee safe and valuable care to users, to people.
Gianluca carries on his work with competence and professionalism and to all this he adds his communicative, listening and above all information transmission skills. He brings with him the ability to try to make people who are in a situation of stress, pain and difficulty feel at ease.
"The relationship, the time you spend with a patient is care," he says, and we are asked how you can put up with all this. How he can stand the pain on people's faces.
"With time I understood that I could perceive the pain and the history of the people who needed me at that moment." He understood how they felt, but most of all he understood that they needed him at that moment, and he had to be there. He had to put all his professionalism at their service to ensure the best of himself and his skills.
Gianluca then tells us about his home, not the one where he returns exhausted after work every evening, but the one that welcomes him every day when he wears the uniform: the operational unit where he works. Because this is for a department, for those who work there every day, for hours and hours.
He tells us how the place that had been a safe haven for him, of which he knew every corner and where he always knew where to find every single object, was suddenly transformed during the Covid-19 emergency. If in that house before everyone had their own distinctive uniform, a specific color to indicate their profession, the need to change their uniforms much more frequently during this pandemic, has upset all this. "From that moment on, we all wore the same uniform," united for one purpose. "I have this memory: in front of me all these names of nurses, anaesthetists, clinicians, other operators that I didn't know but whose names I read on my chest."
And in his own home? The one he returned to after 12-hour shifts, the choice he had to face was difficult, but it was the only one possible: to physically move away from those he loves. Gianluca lives with his husband and a little dog and for their sake he chose to move away, to be alone, isolated, to protect them, but also for those who, for work, came into contact with his partner. Fortunately she was able to do so within her own walls, carving out an isolated environment for herself. It was a relief to stay in familiar places, but a great suffering to have the loved one at one step without being able to embrace them, without being able to receive the comfort that was important at that moment. Because Gianluca is a professional but a human being. And they are two inseparable worlds to take note of.
"I ask people to pause when they are faced with a health care professional and, looking at his uniform, looking at his attitudes, understand that behind that person there are years of study, of sacrifice. Of skills that are not just clinical. There are many people who do not spend Sunday at home with their family but who are happy to do this job, happy to cultivate a profession they have chosen. A conscious choice. And therefore to be a guarantee for the greeting of the community".
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