Public Health – EMSA Turin

The Pillar

The Public Health Pillar is the latest established in the association.

It aims to raise awareness and advocate for a healthy and environmentally friendly lifestyle within and across Europe.

Public health one of the cores of modern medicine and it’s the link between medical sciences and the community we live in.

Being the most recently created, it is still very young and it needs fresh ideas and motivated people to become as important as it should. So far, its main focuses are the Let’s talk about sex program and the flu vaccination campaign.

Let's talk about sex

The aim of Let’s Talk About Sex is to allow health-care students to teach key information to high schools students about the most important STIs they might be exposed to.

EMSA-Torino provides its peer educators with the necessary skills needed to talk about STIs while managing a highly noisy and overly-excited adolescents audience: the result is a 3-hour lesson that has been presented to more than 600 high schools students, in several high schools of Torino.

The impact of our work has also been summarised in a graduation thesis written by a former peer educator of EMSA that successfully graduated in Nursery.

(Dr. T. Nico, Prof. D. Lembo: TESTO TESI E LINK).

Medicine, nursing and psychiatric education students willing to become peer educators are trained through a 16 hours theoretical and practical course that spans throughout a weekend.

The training focuses both on microbiology and on communication skills, and it is held by the project leaders and by already experienced peer educators, with the help of other figures that run specific workshops.

The course was held 3 times so far, training more than 30 students.

The flu vaccination campaign

Another big activity that was carried out by the Pillar was a flu vaccination campaign conducted among San Luigi’s students during the 2019-2020 winter season.

The hospital already had a program to vaccinate most of the workers, but not the students; therefore the Public Health team opened up a discussion amongst the Hospital director and the University Dean. After the talks, specific funds were granted and the vaccination campaign begun. The team was in charge of managing the spots’ reservations and in only 2 weeks, more than 160 students were successfully vaccinated!

What's next?

Many are the ideas and the topics we could tackle.

At the moment we are preparing a project aiming to support the homless people in the Torino city centre, working alongside with other associations operating in this field.

Moreover, we started to plan a public awareness campaign focusing on the end of life.

Finally, we’d like to screen some interesting medicine related movies, opening up discussions on the hottest medical topics.

If you wish to help or you have something you would like to suggest, feel free to contact the pillar director.