RISULTATI RICERCA

The current pandemic has resulted in the withdrawal of all social and health services not aimed at combatting COVID-19. This has led to a weakening of care services for family caregivers, especially in remote areas. Moreover, the pandemic has revealed all the frailties of a socio-health system that rarely involves caregivers in the co-design of services. However, in recent years, there has been a debate about the importance of promoting participatory interventions to support carers. Digital health (DH) intervention has been suggested as a successful tool to as-sist remote carers and engage them. This article reflects on the outcomes of a participatory DH intervention in Valle Camonica for family caregivers. The results indicated how DH could be a valid solution to train caregivers safely and effectively, but also how these interventions could not be considered as a panacea for all the weaknesses of health and social services. Mutual psychological support and community belonging among caregivers are not optimal in a remote connection dimension. This article contributes to the literature on the engagement of caregivers in the co-design of care interventions, with particular attention to DH, by pointing out by pointing out certain aspects that need to be considered in the implementation amongst a fragile population in a rural setting.

This paper aims to analyse the patient-doctor relationship as a form of citizen participation at a micro-level. The work presents the main findings of a study conducted in Italy in the field of type 1 diabetes in 2018, which recruited 47 patients and 20 doctors. Findings show that the patient-doctor relationship is properly explained with a relational perspective, as interdepend-ent figurations of transactors characterised by dynamic processes of power balances. This ap-proach helps to explain patients’ participation by proposing the use of the relational concept of shared doctoring to buttress that of engagement. Indeed, the latter, despite its popularity, still seems to be erratic and blurred. In the end, the concept of engagement underpinned by shared doctoring could be useful for analysing patients’ participation in the healthcare system at a mi-cro-level by inverting healthcare’s underlying foundations towards a logic of care, in place of the current leading logic of choice.