L'integrazione del territorio nel sistema delle cure. Ricadute sul processo formativo

Aim of the present article is to report the conclusions of an educational workshop on the teaching opportunities deriving from community-based medical education. The workshop started with a briefing illustrating why, how and when the hospital and community settings should be integrated in planning an undergraduate curriculum in Medicine. After that, participants have been divided into four parallel workshops respectively dealing with; i) physician-patient-family interaction; ii) management of frail patients in the community; iii) health care in the community; iv) management of healthcare resources in the community. The final debriefing and discussion has allowed some conclusions to be drawn: i) integration of the hospital and community settings in medical students education is both necessary and useful, taking profit of the natural features of the two settings, respectively favouring the study of disease and illness; ii) such an integration should not be limited to the last years of the medical curriculum, but be spread along all the six years, starting from an early clinical contact in the first year; iii) some educational tools and methods appear to be particularly suitable in the community context, e.g. narrative medicine (and board diary in particular) and problem solving (not limited to individual medical histories but extended to community health problems); iv) aim of community-based medical education is not only to develop students’ knowledge, skills and professional competence, but also to help students acquire a comprehensive vision of healthcare management.