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Smart working. Better to say “agile” work, with an Italian term that more correctly adapts to the reality we live in. With the Covid-19 pandemic, this increasingly widespread reality has emerged, and now we are wondering how much can go on in the future as a resource, especially for some categories of fragile workers, such as patients with cancer.
There are 377,000 new cancer diagnoses in Italy in 2020 and almost 4 million Italians living with a cancer diagnosis, tens of thousands in treatment: mortality rates are reduced and survival is lengthened, but often for patients and for those who assist them find it difficult to reconcile professional and working life with the disease, marked by continuous visits to the hospital for examinations, visits, medical and rehabilitation therapies.
This is why 39 Patient Associations gathered in “Health: an asset to defend, a right to promote”, propose to explore new ways for the future of the post-pandemic and above all to evaluate the importance of agile work for those who are facing a condition of complex disease.
An opportunity to be exploited
The online consultation carried out between the associations confirmed that the most fragile workers consider agile work an important opportunity and highlighted the possible interventions that could favor a new, adequate and trained way of working.
Workers living with a tumor report that agile work has advantages from a productive, clinical, psychological and private life point of view: for a person who is facing a tumor it is essential to continue to feel socially useful and to be able to maintain for their activities and role as much as possible. Confirmation also comes from psychologists.
According to Claudia Borreani, Psychologist Head of Clinical Psychology SSD of the IRCCS National Cancer Institute of Milan, “keep the job for the most vulnerable workers such as cancer patients, facilitating working methods as much as possible, allowing the person to feel part of something, active and productive despite the disease, is important but the question is complex.
The size of the job is necessary for economic reasons and for reasons of identity and personal role. The disease cannot and must not wipe out a life of work, especially if there are the conditions to continue the activity that must be guaranteed and protected. Of course, a lot depends on the individual situations, the type of work, expectations, attachment to work and needs that are different for each person ”. In short: if the intrinsic value of work must be guaranteed, the quality and method of work cannot only be solved with agile work.
“There are people for whom work is central, a resource of their life, an important value; others that work undergoes it for various reasons – resumes the expert. The former derive great satisfaction from work, so the illness faced by keeping the working dimension alive draws great benefit from it; for the latter, the disease becomes an opportunity to stop working.
All of this has to do with the type of job, the motivation, the age and the stages of life. In any case, a diagnosis of cancer puts the person in front of an important choice in which the values that everyone attributes to life are at stake. The ideal would be not to be forced to choose.
What is certain is that for some work is a formidable resource, a very important resource, for others work becomes an excessive burden that does not reconcile with illness. The legislation should provide for a remodeling and renegotiation, protecting the work but also adapting it to the actual possibilities of a person living in a condition of severe physical and psychological distress such as a tumor “.
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