New perspectives for the school medical service in Italy
 
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1
Fondazione The Bridge, Milano, Italy
 
2
Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
 
 
Publication date: 2023-04-27
 
 
Popul. Med. 2023;5(Supplement):A1170
 
ABSTRACT
Background and Objective: The School Medical Service was introduced in Italy in 1978 with the aim of developing health prevention and promotion targeted to school pupils. For many years it played a key role, but then it lost its relevance. Despite this, the National Prevention Plan 2020-25 considers it as a fundamental setting for health promotion and protection of the overall national community. Fondazione The Bridge launched an in-depth study aimed to develop an implementation strategy useful to create a new model of school medical service focused on health promotion. Methods: The first step was building a multi-stakeholder working group that worked on the analysis of the literature review to collect examples of best practices at national and international level. The second step concerned the identification of strength and weakness of different regulatory aspects gathered from existing local practices. Three surveys addressed to mayors, teachers and headmasters have been carried out to collect their wishes and views, generating new ideas that have been proposed as suggestions to policy makers. Results: The multistakeholders team identified key issues to be considered when developing a new school medical service able to support health promotion and prevention, including the possibility to consider the school as a vaccination setting. The position paper proposed a working model and concrete operative options for the development of policy initiatives. Conclusions: An innovative strategy able to redesign the relationship between Primary Care, Social Health Services and School, within an integrated strategy able to gather relevant stakeholders (school, health services, municipality), has the potential to generate benefits and positive effects for students, their families and the overall community. Bringing social and health services closer to schools and raising awareness among students can positively influence the determinants of health and ensure greater equity in the provision of social and health services.
ISSN:2654-1459
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