Women's health, 250 hospitals open in Italia for free examinations and tests

"It is not just a week of free services, but a cultural project that has been promoting a gender-sensitive approach to health for years. The numbers of adhesions and services provided show how strong the demand for prevention is and how necessary it is to make services increasingly accessible and geared to women's needs". This is how Francesca Merzagora, president of Fondazione Onda Ets, presents Open Week, which, as every year, renews the 'pact' on women's health, with more than 250 hospitals with the now famous 'pink sticker', which all over the country open their doors to prevention, with free examinations and tests.

The (H) Open Week promoted by the Foundation is scheduled from 22 to 29 April, on the occasion of the 11th National Women's Health Day, established in 2015 to be celebrated every 22 April, the date of birth of neurologist Rita Levi Montalcini. For one week, the network facilities will offer free examinations, instrumental examinations, telephone consultations, remote interviews and information events to female citizens. The services can be consulted on the site www.bollinirosa.it, through a search engine indexed by region, province and specialist area.

The offerings involve many areas, including cardiology, gynaecology and obstetrics, endocrinology, neurology, gynaecological and medical oncology, senology, rheumatology, psychiatry, nutrition, and paths dedicated to violence against women. Nicoletta Orthmann, the Foundation's medical-scientific director, goes into detail: 'Shortening the distance between users and services is the first objective of initiatives such as this one, and it also makes it possible to publicise new realities in which dedicated pathways have been set up over time, promoting the culture of prevention, therapeutic adherence and early diagnosis,' she says.

The 'pink stickers' are awarded on the basis of the answers to a questionnaire of about 550 questions, and the treatment areas have been further enriched this year: "In the new network of hospitals active since last January, we have included paediatrics, the pain area and ophthalmology," Orthmann announces, "i.e. areas in which the need to decline services and attention according to gender medicine is gaining ground. This, within a framework of extreme heterogeneity in the range of services on offer, which takes into account the great need for prevention and care as well as the high level of adhesion that we record every year from users'.

Among the areas in which the offer is broadest are the 'woman-friendly' ones, for example cancer prevention with senology and gynaecology, but also cardiovascular, 'on which little is still being done in general,' emphasises Orthmann. Then we look at complex age groups, such as the menopause: in this case, the multi-specialist dimension allows users to interface, also during the conferences organised during (H) Open Week, with several professionals together: from nutritionist to cardiologist to gynaecologist to psychologist. The idea is therefore to do prevention both 'vertically' - think of a mammogram - and transversally, as in the case of the female age group that follows fertile age.