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Valeria Graziano 2022-09-17 02:16:58 -07:00
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@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Looking back at the Italian struggles for health of the 1960s and 1970s is a rel
The pressure for creating such public health care system was born from an unprecedented alliance between left political forces, advanced experiences renewing medical practice, radical health activism, struggles by trade unions, workers groups, student and feminist movements. The 1978 reform was a universal, public, free health service, offering a wide range of provision outside the market, largely modelled on the British NHS and reflecting the definition of health spelt out by the WHO in 1946.
Abandoning the tradition of a corporatist health system with its limited coverage of separate professional groups, Italys reform introduced a public and universal health service, financed through general taxation, freely available to all/
Abandoning the tradition of a corporatist health system with its limited coverage of separate professional groups, Italys reform introduced a public and universal health service, financed through general taxation, freely available to all.
The link between the self-organized struggles and the new public system becomes apparent in the way it was designed in its original conception (albeit soon corrupted by a series of reactionary modification to the law). In several areas mental health, occupational health, womens health, drug treatments - new knowledge on illness prevention, new practices of service delivery and innovative institutional arrangements emerged, with a strong emphasis on territorial services addressing together health and social needs. The movements' legacy was palpable in the integrated vision of health physical and psychic, individual and collective, linked to the community and the territory that emerged. The struggles were clear in their proposal: a new, less hierarchical type of doctor-patient relationship was needed; healthcare should be linked to territories and, as much as possible, conducted in participatory manner; preventive approaches, rather than curing, were central in this vision. This political strategy viewed health as combining a collective dimension and an individual condition; collective struggles were therefore needed to address the economic and social roots of disease and public health problems. This approach was paralleled by the feminist movement in addressing womens health issues, including the important experiments in self-organized health clinics. As Giulio Maccacaro had argued in 1976, the strategy was a bottom-up “politicization of medicine”, challenging the way industrial capitalism was exploiting workers and undermining health and social conditions in the country.