Progetti di ricerca

One of the goals of the Agenda for Sustainable Development is good health and well-being, which aims at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all citizens of all ages. Despite the aspiration to guarantee equal access to healthcare, in… Leggi tutto Europe, there are persistent inequalities between migrants and natives in access to healthcare services. Although today more than five million foreigners live in Italy, compared to the international literature, evidence on migrants’ health and the effect of migration on health and healthcare use is limited for the country. One of the reasons for the lack of studies is the data availability and fragmentation. Healthcare databases have, in fact, several limits because some relevant information about behaviours (such as smoking habits and drinking) and private for-pay health services utilisation are missing. Available survey data on migrants’ health and access to healthcare uncover irregular migrants, underestimate recent migrants, and collect data only with reference to the time of the survey. Moreover, the fragmentation of the available results prevents access to synthetic information for policymakers to promote targeted policies; clear indications are missing to help those who assist migrants in addressing migrants’ needs. Our project aims to fill this gap by producing new and updated knowledge on migrants’ health, unmet needs, and access to healthcare services by providing the policymakers and those who assist migrants with a comprehensive tool (dashboard) that allows consulting data on migrants’ health, unmet needs, and access to healthcare services and visualising a set of potentially critical indicators in supporting decisions and policies in the Lombardy and Marche regions. The project will analyse the regional healthcare databases to quantify and evaluate the use of health services in the migrant population and to estimate the health condition of migrants in real-world, to compare Italians' and migrants’ health through the Regional Health System focusing on the comparison on birth outcomes and selected chronic and acute diseases. To overcome the limitations of secondary data and provide complementary information, the project will collect new data on migrants’ health, needs and access to healthcare services, including irregular migrants, through a survey. The data collected by the ad hoc survey will improve knowledge of migrants’ subjective health, health needs and access to healthcare services. These two sources of data will be combined to build synthetic indicators that will be available to policymakers through a specific tool constructed to consult and visualise the indicators. Once experimented, this approach will constitute a prototype to be applied in other Italian regions. The project will also provide innovative methodological results: the use of two sources of data will allow for evaluating the under coverage and the bias when using only a unique source.