L’Antropologia nella Primary Health Care. Costruire gli Ospedali di Comunità, tra cure intermedie e nuove forme di cooperazione

Chronic diseases, population ageing, and recent social changes have highlighted the urge ofstrengthening intermediate care. This concept refers to a wide range of services which havethe aim of addressing the health needs of people who have been discharged from the hospi-tal to home in order to better coordinate longitudinal and community-oriented care. Giventhe complex nature of the health needs which emerge in this scenario, health facilities mustprovide different disciplines, skills and tools based on the contexts and the relations thatsubstantiate care practices. In perspective, medical anthropology/ical knowledge can play adecisive role. However, such input requires a transformation of university education, in-cluding humanistic and anthropological curricula, by addressing them primarily to field-work and engaged research in communities, which is still weakly realized in Italy. This ar-ticle focuses on an action research project that we carried out, as Ph.D. students andanthropologists, within an international cooperation and health policies project developedbetween the Emilia-Romagna Region and Brazil, in 2019. The text discusses the contribu-tions made by ethnographic, applied and distinctly interdisciplinary Ph.D. research, whichcan constitute a resource for promoting forms of participatory and community planning ofhealth services.