The Regione Puglia Councillor for Health Tommaso Fiore meets the NIHMP Director General Concetta Mirisola
The Regione Puglia Councillor Tommaso Fiore and the NIHMP Director General Concetta Mirisola met on November 9, 2011 at the National Institute for Health, Migration and Poverty in Rome.
The meeting was the starting point for a shared action aimed at evaluating and spreading at the national and international levels the good practice model adopted in the three Regional Centres of the Institute.
The shared objective is to plan common actions for facing the current crisis which is now strengthening migration flows from developing to developed countries, and which is also worsening social discomfort and poverty in the big cities of the North of the world. The NIHMP continues to represent a national referral point for disadvantaged population groups and for the whole Italian national health system. It also cooperates with important EU research centres and with the WHO.
In the framework of the dramatic events of Lampedusa, the intervention models adopted by the three NIHMP Regional Centres were actively integrated. In Sicilia, the NIHMP staff demonstrated the capacity to act in emergency situations where thousands of people were in extremely severe psychological and physical conditions. In Puglia, the Regional Centre had the difficult task of receiving and answering the needs of newly arrived migrants; finally, the Lazio headquarters managed problems related with stable populations living at the margins in the big cities. The three models – said Councillor Fiore – constitute a unique methodological approach managed by the National Institute for facing the challenge of complexity. This approach is based on the results of field research, which are also used in training activities to continuously improve the capacity of services to meet the needs of the population.
The added value of the approach adopted – state Mirisola and Fiore – is its integration within the international dimension of the phenomenon. Indeed, the Institute cooperates with UN agencies on the problems related to poverty and migration in Western countries.
The visit of Councillor Fiore also represented an occasion for the staff of the Institute to show the reception and care activities offered every day by the Rome outpatient clinic. It is a high quality specialised service which was also recently strengthened with the introduction of the Social Dentistry and Ophthalmology Clinics and the opening on Saturdays and Sundays for meeting the needs of disadvantaged population groups.
