Isabell Rumrich – STSM 33687

Isabell Rumrich – STSM 33687

Main points of the COST-STSM-IS1408-33687

Name: Isabell Rumrich
Home institution: National Institute for Health and Welfare, Kuopio, Finland
Host institution: Department of Epidemiology, Regional Health Service of Lazio, Rome, Italy
Official Host: Carla Ancona
Duration: 5th to 20th April 2016

STSM Topic: Review of methods for Health Impact Assessment of Industrially Contaminated Sites in Europe

Description of the main results obtained from the STSM
  • One of the main STSM activities was in support to the Action WG3 task to review national case studies on industrially contaminated sites by using a review template.
  • The review template was used for 11 of the identified case studies from Finland and Italy. The review template was therefore updated in terms of structure and items to be collected.
  • In order to complete the collection of national case-studies, the representatives of each Action country have been requested to provide one or more papers or reports.
  • A systematic literature search in PubMed to identify published case studies was designed and carried out according to Cochrane guidelines. 8 different search strategies have been used to identify relevant articles. The number of retrieved papers ranged between 128 and 25.542. The high fraction of irrelevant articles shows clearly that the search strategies need refinements to be more specific.
  • Part of the STSM was spent at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) Rome, where the SENTIERI approach was introduced and evaluated as example based on the use of mortality and on hospital discharge records to characterize the health profile of populations living in Italian contaminated sites.
Future collaboration with the host institution
  • The aim of the STSM was to create an outline of the networking summary that would feed into the formulation of recommendations in the final report of the action.
  • The work accomplished during this STSM was more basic work developing the tools to collect the networking summary and therefore will not explicitly result in the report.
  • The collaboration with the host institution will continue in the future with preliminary discussion about future STSMs with colleagues from DEP visiting Kuopio or vice versa.

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