TY  - JOUR
AU  - De Palma, Giuseppe
TI  - Bridging Two Gaps: A Roadmap for Collaboration Between Occupational Physicians and General Practitioners
PY  - %2026/%08/%03
Y2  - %2026/%08/%27
JF  - La Medicina del Lavoro
JA  - Med Lav
VL  - 117
IS  - 4
SE  - Reviews, Commentaries, Perspectives
DO  - 10.23749/mdl.2026.19121
UR  - https://doi.org/10.23749/mdl.2026.19121
SP  - 19121
AB  - 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.
ER  -