About Course
This course starts from the evidence that a national and/or territorial health system has to be sustainable, starting from the answer to the most important international and local criteria. It means that, being impossible to give the best health care to the whole population, and unfair to provide qualified services only to a small percentage of privileged subjects, the goal is to build a system that responds to the three major pillars of sustainability, the economic, social, and environmental. In this sense the aim is to give a sustainable medical assistance to the largest majority of the population.
If we consider this strategy in a developing country, with major problems of resources and communication routes, we can individuate as the best solution a network with a rigorous hierarchy (avoiding inefficiencies and cathedrals in the desert), based on very few highly qualified centres, a little group of “General Hospitals”, having capability to manage the majority of the most important pathological conditions, a large number of peripheral “first level health centres”, able to individuate pathological conditions that need a further evaluation at a higher professional level, and/or to solve the simplest and most frequent local problems. These peripheral centres have to be organized as medical structures able to follow pregnancies, births and simplest pathological conditions, with main reference to the infective ones and to first aid emergencies. Reinforced with a minimal technological support, they must be equipped with fundamental instruments, such as an electrocardiograph, a defibrillator, a manual ultrasonograph. Furthermore, this structure must have the skills to do prevention and telemedicine, connecting local operators with experts. Aim of this course is to give to pre-bachelor students educational premises to assess their interest and actual level of competence to become operators in these centres. In the near future, their role could be individuated either to help in solving local problems or to connect online the peripheral centres with the ones at a superior level.