BOLOGNA, JUNE 28 – Giulia is 18 years old, she attends the fifth year of high school in Cassino (Frosinone), but she took her final exams from her hospital bed at the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute in Bologna. The high school was founded at Rizzoli, the first location in Italy, in 1997, thanks to an agreement between the Orthopedic Institute, the then Bologna Education Authority and the Association for the study and treatment of bone and soft tissue tumors. Giulia’s story begins two years ago, when after a motorbike accident she was hospitalized in Rome, then for several months last summer in Bologna for surgery at Rizzoli. In March, she needed another long hospital stay in the Orthopedic Reconstructive Surgery and Innovative Techniques department (directed by Dr. Dante Dallari). Here, thanks to the Hospital School, Giulia can keep up with her class: the teaching activity is agreed between the teachers of the school she comes from and those who work in the hospital, who are all teachers from the Scappi Institute of Castel San Pietro. In May, she was discharged and returned home, but then a new hospitalization in the first days of June made it necessary to urgently activate the procedure to take the state exam ‘off-site’. “Thanks to the collaboration between our school, the Lazio School Office, the management of Rizzoli and the examination board of the school she comes from, we were able to organize all the steps necessary to guarantee Giulia the possibility of taking her exam even if she is hospitalized”, explains Professor Antonella De Tommasi who coordinates the Hospital School of Rizzoli. The written tests, Italian and Economics, arrived via certified email to the hospital management: Giulia took the tests sitting in bed, isolated by a screen, in the presence of the coordinating professor and teachers from the Scappi Institute. Today he took the oral exam, connected from Rizzoli but included in his class calendar. (ANSA).
