A public health Italian ethical movement to sustain the beveridge model: health promotion and equity

Abstract

Abstract Worldwide sustainability of the National Health Systems (NHS) has been facing different challenges, such as population ageing, epidemiologic transition and deep social transformations. All these changes are struggling Italian welfare state and its public NHS. Following the principle of the Right to Health of the Declaration of Human Right and the Italian Constitution, a group of young health professionals from all over Italy founded a campaign called “2018 Primary Health care: Now or Never”(PHC Campaign) reminding WHO report of 2008 “primary Health Care: Now more than never”. This movement promotes a reform of the NHS focusing on comprehensive-PHC (C-PHC) and health promotion to guarantee sustainability of the Beveridge model italian system, fight health inequalities and answer the complexity of population needs in a period of spending cuts. Since the beginning, the movement started an educational program through the study of the literature and the research of the Italian and international best practices of C-PHC and community health promotion. As a result, to achieve the goal of this project, PHC campaign organized peer education training sessions, educational site-visit of some Italian best practices, lectures and workshops with Italian and foreigner health professionals experts on the field. Several national and regional events had been organized all over Italy. Members of “PHC” Campaign have been invited to write books, news on web-based newspapers on this topic and participate in congresses. To date, PHC campaign might be considered one of the strongest not-institutional voices in Italy in supporting the public beveridge-model NHS Moved from a strong ethical health policy view underlined the importance of the Right-to-Health and of a C-PHC based NHS, since the beginning, “2018 Primary Health care: Now or Never” Movement identified three asset of action: advocacy, education/knowledge and diffusion. Key messages The experience showed the importance of health professionals engagement in public health topics such as sustainability of public NHS in order to promote a reform towards health promotion and equity. PHC Campaign is an example of how a bottom-up ethical movement on public health from different Health professionals could actively contribute to promoting cultural and health policy change.