Bridging Two Gaps: A Roadmap for Collaboration Between Occupational Physicians and General Practitioners
Main Article Content
Keywords
Total Worker Health®, Occupational Medicine, General Practice, , Integrated Care, Workplace Health Promotion, Migrant Workers, Italy
Abstract
Occupational physicians (OPs) and general practitioners (GPs) manage overlapping aspects of the same patient’s health yet rarely communicate with one another. By assigning OPs a role in promoting cancer screening, Law 198/2025 has created in Italy a regulatory link between occupational surveillance and public health prevention—a link that cannot function without a structured exchange of data between the two professional roles. This commentary argues that the new regulatory framework, together with Legislative Decree 135/2024 on carcinogens, mutagens, and substances toxic to reproduction, and Legislative Decree 29/2024 on active aging, offers an unprecedented—yet narrow—window of opportunity to build formal collaboration between OPs and GPs in Italy. Another argument concerns the growing presence of foreign-born workers, who may carry undiagnosed endemic conditions and face language barriers that make OP–GP coordination essential for safe fitness-for-work assessments. Drawing on documented challenges from similar initiatives in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Finland, we identify the main structural obstacles in the Italian context and propose a three-tiered roadmap for implementation, progressing from immediate consensus-based models to the long-term integration of occupational health data into the Electronic Health Record 2.0.
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