Rome, 2 April 2024 – The Italian Society of Hygiene, Preventive Medicine and Public Health (SItI) has sent an open letter to the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci regarding the “Simplifications” and Prevention Law Bill, which intends to expand the offer of services that citizens can use in pharmacies. A provision – aimed at providing citizens with essential local services and which provides clarity regarding the permitted activities – welcomed by the scientific society, which has always shown itself open to discussion to achieve objectives of improving individual and public health.
The Italian Hygiene Society, however, also in light of the experience gained during the Covid-19 pandemic, did not fail to strongly underline how these services must be accompanied by careful assessments of safety, quality and effectiveness. The two new issues are represented by the possibility, only for those pharmacies that intend to exercise these prerogatives, to administer the vaccines present in the vaccination calendar of the National Vaccine Prevention Plan (PNPV), to the definition of which SItI contributed, to subjects aged over 12 years of age, as well as carrying out diagnostic tests involving the collection of biological samples at nasal, salivary and oropharyngeal levels.
Although this Bill pays attention to the issue of training and safety for the provision of the aforementioned services within pharmacies, it is considered essential that, during the approval process, Parliament can postpone the definition to subsequent implementing decrees of these aspects, better regulating both the quality criteria relating to the training of the personnel responsible for administering vaccines and the prescriptive procedure for vaccinations – especially with regard to elderly and frail patients, who often take concomitant therapies which require an in-depth evaluation medical history – as well as the methods of collecting and processing sensitive data and the management of emergencies possibly linked to side effects of administration, even if rare.
The Scientific Society believes it is equally important to monitor the actual activation of these services on the national territory, verifying their use by citizens and the actual ability to improve coverage.
In this regard, the experience acquired with flu and Covid-19 vaccinations in the 2023-24 season has highlighted the risk that a fragmentation of supply could negatively impact vaccination coverage. Therefore, in order to avoid dispersing the vaccination routes into a thousand streams, in the opinion of the Italian Hygiene Society, it is of fundamental importance to identify a clear governance of the entire process in the Prevention Departments.
“With this letter, addressed to prof. Orazio Schillaci – declares Prof. Roberta Siliquini, President of the Italian Hygiene Society (SItI) – we propose that the Ministry of Health promotes the establishment of a discussion table which involves all the actors of the process, in order to to guarantee the population shared and safe routes throughout the national territory”.
Open letter to the Minister of Health:
