Vaccines are a fundamental tool for saving lives, combating the phenomenon of antimicrobial resistance and preventing some cancers. Farmindustria recently recalled this on the occasion of the World Immunization Week and the European Immunization Week, celebrated at the end of April with the aim of highlighting the importance of vaccines to protect health of people of all ages. The 2024 edition of World Vaccination Week, in particular, celebrated 50 years of the Expanded Program on Immunization (Epi), recognizing the collective efforts to save many lives from vaccine-preventable diseases and inviting countries to increase investments in national vaccination programs to protect the next generations.
But the challenge is also to offer protection throughout life, given the progressive aging of the population and the need to keep it active and healthy. Various vaccinations can protect adults over 65 years of age and frail people suffering from other pathologies: from anti-Herpes zoster to anti-papilloma virus (HPV); from tetanus to pneumococcal and the various meningococcal strains (A, B, C, W, Y), without forgetting the vaccines against influenza and Covid-19.
However, in recent years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, progress made through vaccinations has slowed. An effective way to facilitate citizens’ access to vaccination services are open days: moments of awareness and information with free or facilitated access, promoted by hospitals, hygiene services, clinicians and local institutions, which allow different types of vaccination to be carried out .
“To try to reach as many of the population as possible, already last year, in autumn, we held an open day which we then repeated again this year. These were open days reserved for the population segment entitled to free vaccination by age per cohort. To these we have also added other activities by carrying out a vaccination project for chronic patients followed at the Niguarda clinics who could have “privileged” access on certain days and times”, explains Maurizio Orso, Director of the Functional Prevention Department and Director of the Structure Complex Vaccination and Surveillance of Infectious Diseases Niguarda Hospital.
And in Lombardy – since the beginning of the year – family doctors have also entered the field who can administer the Herpes zoster vaccine in their own clinic. “The opening up to general practitioners – observes Orso – is an absolutely positive thing since they have access to the lists of their patients also on the basis of the pathologies from which they are affected and therefore they can also more easily identify the population that can benefit from this vaccination. And in any case, an increasingly active collaboration with general practitioners to identify patients and then be able to send them to a facility that can take care of the vaccination is certainly a very positive aspect”, he adds.
“That of hospital and general medicine is a single machine and therefore if everything works in collaboration, it certainly works better, rather than independently”, underlines Riccardo Capucci, a general practitioner from Milan, who adds: “Where the collaboration between the area and the hospital work well, the patients are better looked after.”
Often open days are also occasions where multiple vaccinations are offered at the same time: an opportunity that can encourage people to take advantage of these opportunities. This is what happened, for example, in Viterbo during the prevention week against Herpes zoster, when an extraordinary opening of the ASL vaccination center took place, in collaboration with the Italian Association of Women Doctors of Viterbo. “It was a very satisfying day”, says Chiara Errera, secretary of the Viterbo section of the Italian Association of Women Doctors (Aidm), who adds: “We had good participation and we carried out 55 vaccinations including anti-Herpes zoster, anti- papilloma virus (Hpv) and tetanus and also against pneumococcus and covid. If you think that last year, in total, around fifty vaccinations were carried out against zoster over the course of the year; we achieved the same result in just one day.” And Errera underlines the importance of the collaboration of general practitioners with local hygiene services: “It is in the local area that prevention can be achieved, awareness can be raised and solutions implemented, such as open days, which they allow you to reach the patient more easily,” he observes.
If the collaboration also involves local administrations, the success of these initiatives is guaranteed: even in the smallest centres. In Striano, a municipality of almost 9,000 inhabitants in the metropolitan city of Naples located in the Sarno Valley, recently the local administration, in collaboration with the ASL Napoli 3 Sud and the Aft2 – Territorial Functional Association of General Practitioners of Striano- Poggiomarino-Terzigno, promoted an open day for vaccination against Herpes zoster with free access and aimed at the entire population of the health district. “The main purpose of these initiatives is to inform citizens and, at the same time, offer them the opportunity to carry out vaccinations”, says Luigi Francese, general practitioner from Striano, who adds: “We have teamed up with the institutions of territory and with the municipal administration, which has always been sensitive to the issues of prevention and protection of public health, to reach the greatest number of people possible. From this point of view, in fact, the open day formula proves effective and can be exported to different territorial and organizational contexts”.
Sometimes, then, the first citizens are directly involved as they themselves are doctors, as in the case of Francesco Buzzo, general practitioner and first citizen of Valle di Maddaloni, in the province of Caserta, who recently promoted the health and prevention day “Let’s put out the shingles”. “For the success of these initiatives, collaboration between institutions, doctors and associations is essential – recalls Buzzo -. I, as an administrator, am not new to these initiatives. We often hold prevention days but this one saw the involvement of the Territorial Functional Association of General Practitioners of Maddaloni district 13 and therefore numerous general practitioners participated”. And the added value of these appointments is precisely linked to the combination of information and involvement of the general practitioner, the patient’s point of reference: “If there is information, people respond and the work of the general practitioner is fundamental in all of this ”, he concludes.
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