Laboratorio di Mondialità: the approach of italian medical students to global health issues

Widespread interest in Global Health issues is a common feature of Medical Schools over the last decade, nevertheless surveys suggest that in-depth teaching of Global Health issues in italian medical faculties are rare. Six years ago, the members of Segretariato Italiano Studenti in Medicina (SISM) started to deal with global health issues and, in order to fill this gap, created a national three days workshop called Laboratorio di Mondialità (LabMond). Since 2007, every year, SISM, in collaboration with the Centre for International Health (CSI) and the Italian Global Health watch (OISG), organizes LabMond for about one hundred italian medical students. The event is set up as a workshop, consisting in an introductional part, analysis and feedback sessions. The main topics of LabMond consist in determinants of health, health inequalities, migrants medicine and how globalization influences our health; these topics are faced with interactive methodologies such as case studies, small working groups, role plays.Small working groups, about ten people each, are moments in which students work, figure out common ideas about global health and migrant medicine, develop concret strategy to bring at home the talked-about issues and carry them on. More generally, the organizational choice of a laboratory, rather than a course or a conference, aims to call into question the position of participants, and the term "Laboratorio" underlines the importance of the student's work on his knowledge and our attempt to stimulate his curiosity to go deep into the subject. Thus, LabMond is more than a simple course on Global Health: it represents an educational opportunity for the participants as well as for the organizers and the trainers. In the last six years hundreds of students has been sensitized and in more than ten different italian Faculties of Medicine these students, with the help of global health experts, set up local courses and local group of self-education to go deeper in these topics. The students of SISM believe that it's necessary to continue to support this process in which such a lot of students are involved in order to foster an ethic re-placement of students themselves as future health professionists and as characters able to reduce health inequalities and injustices that nowadays are killing people on a large scale.