Nurses must be compensated if they are assigned to the duties of social health workers

For the professional nurse assigned "ordinarily", and therefore not on an "exceptional and contingent" basis to activities that are the responsibility of social-health workers, the right to compensation for damages for the injury to professional dignity and image suffered due to demotion is triggered. This was established by the Court of Cassation, with order no. 12139 filed today, rejecting the appeal of an Abruzzo Local Health Authority sentenced by the Court of Appeal of L'Aquila, on an equitable basis, to pay the employee 6% of the salary for the entire period in which the lower-ranking activity had been performed.

In the motivation of the sentence, the territorial Court emphasized the purely manual nature of the tasks imposed, "in light of the intellectual character, for the level of knowledge required", of the profession of the nurse and the fact that all of this occurred in the presence of the patients. In the appeal, the health company stated that the OSS activities could not be considered extraneous to the professionalism of the nurse and that the Code of Ethics requires that nurses compensate for the company's poor service.

For the Labor Section, there is no doubt that the request to nurses for activities specific to OSS is not a priori illegitimate, being based on the worker's duties of flexibility; however - the Court specifies - "it must be about activities that do not express professional contents that are completely extraneous to the nurse's specific tasks"; but this - it adds - is not the case in question, where it is clear that the tasks requested in any case concerned personal care, which is a common trait of the two professions. The request for lower tasks - the decision continues - must also respond to "a concrete need and therefore not to extemporaneous choices or demands for lower level work even in the presence of availability of personnel of the relevant category". Finally, and this is the crucial point in the specific case, such services must be requested "incidentally or marginally". The lower tasks - the Court summarizes - are always legitimate if "marginal", that is, of little and limited quantitative importance compared to the tasks of actual relevance.

And then, he concludes on the point, the second-instance judge correctly held that, although it emerged in the testimony that the nurses were mainly assigned to their own activity, nevertheless «over the years» they had been asked to perform the services typical of OSS such as: «Transporting the sick, tidying the beds, answering the bells, taking care of the patients' hygiene duties, changing diapers, bringing the bedpans and the urinals and then emptying and cleaning them»; and this in a «by no means marginal and sporadic way, nor of a short period, but rather constant and systematic, since it was carried out daily and for a good part of the working day».

Broadening the framework to the specific area of ​​nurses, the Court of Cassation has established the following principle of law in the field of privatized public employment: "the worker, given that his duty of loyal collaboration in the protection of the public interest underlying the exercise of the activity is relevant, may be assigned to tasks that are inferior to those assigned, but only on condition that such tasks are not completely extraneous to his professionalism, that there is an objective need, organizational or safety, of the employer and that, moreover, the request for such inferior tasks occurs marginally with respect to the qualifying activities of the professional classification of the worker or that, when such marginality does not occur, without prejudice to the prevalent performance of the aforementioned qualifying activities, the performance of inferior tasks is merely occasional".