Undocumented migrants in Italy make more use of emergency rooms and hospital admissions than pharmaceutical prescriptions and specialistic visits. This is true even for chronic diseases for which undocumented migrants are entitled to essential treatment beyond emergency: hospitalizations account for about 50% of total expenditure for Italian citizens affected by diabetes, but as much as 90% for undocumented migrants. Furthermore, services provided to them by charities seem to be more effective than services provided by the Italian National Health System to documented migrants. In the case of diabetes again, receiving healthcare services from a charitable organization rather than from the NHS increases the probability of complying with prescriptions by 1.19 times.

These observations are among the first outputs of Motive, a project financed by the Italian ministry of Education and Research, which seeks to build a research platform containing a wealth of multiple-source health care data about migrants and frail populations. The aim is to promote its use to generate evidence for an efficient and effective decision-making process. The project team includes representatives of various Italian universities, among which CERGAS Bocconi’s Elisabetta Listorti and Aleksandra Torbica. As a result of the project, the two scholars, along with Silvano G. Cella, Gianfrancesco Fiorini, Giovanni Corrao and Matteo Franchi from University of Milan,University of Milan-Bicocca and Istituti Clinici Zucchi, have authored two papers about undocumented migrants affected by diabetes.

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