About

The Bambino Gesù Paediatric Hospital (OPBG) is a Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care, Italy’s main paediatric Hospital providing advanced health care for children and performing basic, clinical and translational research activities.

OPBG pursues excellency in health care, while constantly referring to Catholic principles and ethical values that inspired it’s foundation and ensure it’s continuous development. OPBG’s excellency in health care is achieved through advanced research and clinical activities, while managing resources to ensure administrative/financial balance and constantly improving processes to exploit the progress of biomedical science.

The Hospital is part of the Italian National Healthcare System and is widely recognized as referral centre for all paediatrics specialties at national and international levels. With its 11 Departments, covering all aspects of paediatrics care, the Hospital provides a complete range of healthcare services to children. OPBG has a total permanent staff of approx. 2,500, of which 550 physicians, 45 biologists and pharmacists, involved both in clinical and in research activities. OPBG has a research staff on a non-permanent position of 180. There are also approx. 50 post-graduate trainees (medical and surgical) and over 100 students and interns. Yearly clinical activities consist of approx. 27,000 inpatient admissions, 77,000 day hospital admissions, 6,000 day surgery treatments and over 1,500,000 outpatient visits.

The Hospital’s clinical activities run side by side with its scientific research, aiming at constantly improving and innovating diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Research activities are organized in “Research Areas”: genetic and rare diseases, multifactorial and complex diseases, immunology, infectiology and development of paediatric drugs, onco-haematology, clinical management and technological innovations.

Role in the project

The Bambino Gesù Paediatric Hospital (OPBG) is the leader of the Work Package 2 (Innovation in informed consent). The main tasks carried out by the OPBG are the analysis of existing informed consents in clinical trials (past and current). Other activities are to Identify and analyse latest trends in eHealth/mHealth and relevant initiatives for eConsent in healthcare systems worldwide. The OPBG focused it research on the analysis of potential sensitive issues in specific domains as per case studies in different languages/cultures through social network analysis and the analysis of ethical, privacy and data protection issues associated with the use of ICT for obtaining informed consent. The main scopes are to develop new strategies for increasing participation of women in clinical trials, of patients from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds in clinical trials and new strategies for improving health literacy for participants in clinical trials and communications between patients and clinicians.

Dr. Alberto Eugenio Tozzi

Dr Tozzi is a pediatrician and an epidemiologist with experience in vaccine trials and in surveillance of infectious diseases.

He has worked as a researcher with the Italian National Health Institute for more than 15 years. He had responsibilities in surveillance of infectious diseases at the European level, and in supporting recommendations on immunization (Italian Ministry of Health). He has been part of the coordination group of a clinical trial on pertussis vaccines. He was responsible for a study on the effect of thimerosal (US CDC). After he joined the OPBG’s epidemiology unit. He worked in vaccine preventable diseases. He has been a consultant for WHO for activities on polio and on vaccines’ adverse events. He is a component of the Expert Vaccine Group of the European CDC.

Tasks performed for the project: Coordinate the activities of developing tailored strategies to inform the development of IC. He will manage the taskforce to develop different tools for the administration of the informed consent.

Email: alberto.tozzi@opbg.net

Phone: (+39) 0668592401

Team

SALLY JACKSON

Email: sally.jackson@opbg.net

SIMONETTA ZEZZA

Communication Officer

Email: simonetta.zezza@fastwebnet.it

Other Partners