The city’s support of its hospital

It was an evening when everybody, the public, patients and employees, were able to embrace the ideals of the “Circolo” Hospital, in Varese. On Thursday evening, Varese University’s great hall in Via Ravasi provided the demonstration of how much the city cares about "its" hospital, with a large attendance and a warm greeting to those who had distinguished themselves in their work. Employees that had retired between April 2010 and June 2011 were each rewarded.

Walter Bergamaschi (see photo), the hospital’s general manager, began the evening with a speech about the future ("looking forward, and being able to adapt the present to where we want to go"), but also about the present, which needs to consider the issues that hospital administrators always have to deal with in order to balance the books.

Bergamaschi’s speech began with the controversies of the previous months. "In September of this year, I made a serious mistake. We had to implement a series of measures in order to balance the budget, which is the real guarantee of being able maintain adequate levels of health care. In that difficult situation, among the cost containing measures, we also included the decision not to renew the flexible contracts that were about to expire, which were mainly of young doctors and nurses. It wasn’t this that was the mistake, but the failure to consider the hospital as an open community founded on motivation. With that measure we depressed not only the aspirations of our youngest members of staff, we also damaged the motivation of the rest of the hospital community. However, we remedied the situation. We listened to the opinions of people of Varese and talked to them, and we corrected the mistake."

The speech was sincere and realistic, and received a long applause from the audience.

The interventions by the authorities (the general manager of the health service in Lombardy, Carlo Lucchina (see photo), and the Regional Councillor for Infrastructure and Transport, Raffaele Cattaneo) were followed by presentations of the hospital as by its employees; a series of videos, ten in all, were shown, with the voices of those who are there, every day, beside the patients.

From Luino to the “Del Ponte” Hospital. From Cittiglio to Cuasso, to Varese’s casualty and other departments, the testimonies of nurses, doctors, specialists and radiologists were shown on the maxi screen.

One pleasant detail worthy of note was the evening’s soundtrack. The music had been written by Roberto Iacono, an employee of the hospital, and was performed live, accompanying the videos produced by the multimedia team of Dr. Fanny Cecconi’s nursing service “SITRA”.

The evening also provided the opportunity to reveal the creation of the “Circolo della bontà” Foundation to the public, which was done by the journalist Gianni Spartà; a video was shown that described the lives of the hospital’s benefactors.

The crowning moment of the evening was the recognition of the work of the employees that had retired between 17 April 2010 and 30 June 2011. Depending on their years of service, they were given a gold or silver brooch or tie pin. Also in this case, the presentation was followed by some videos; the first was dedicated to the former employees of the “Circolo” and Cuasso; the second, to the those of the units in Luino and Cittiglio, and the third, to those of the “Del Ponte” Hospital.

The blood donors association, AVIS (Dr Vincenzo Saturni), and the “Ponte del Sorriso” Foundation (Emanuela Crivellaro) were also rewarded.

The evening was ably hosted by the journalist Roberto Bof, back from a greatly successful solidarity event, who, despite the presence of the many important authorities in the audience, managed to make it informal and enthralling.

Here is the link to the list of pensioners who were rewarded during the evening.