SaMiFo (Salute per Migranti Forzati, or Health for Forced Migrants) is a health care service reserved for asylum seekers and refuges that was born out of a collaboration between the Association Centro Astalli and the Azienda di Sanità Pubblica ASL RM A (Public Health Care Firm ASL Rome A). The service was launched in 2007 and its activities are carried out in the ASL at Via Luzzati in Rome. The objective of the project is to assure that access to the right to medical care is guaranteed for forced migrants.

Patients are guided through bureaucratic activities, such as registration with the National Health Care System. Most importantly, SaMiFo tries to offer concrete medical assistance that responds to the problems of people originating from very diverse geographical and cultural contexts, who often have incredible life stories. Registration is an important moment, both for informing the patient about the procedure of accessing the system, and for promptly resolving difficulties that might arise as a foreigner interacts with the public system.

Psychological and psychiatric attention are particularly relevant, especially for torture victims, who represent almost half of overall patients. For these extremely vulnerable individuals, SaMiFo offers legal medical service to provide official certifications of violence that has been suffered. The staff members and the mediators that work at SaMiFo are part of Centro Astalli’s personnel, while the physicians are in part volunteers, and in part made available by the ASL. In addition, SaMiFo utilizes the collaboration of volunteers and a number of interns, the former provided thanks to an agreement with the Communication Sciences Department at University of La Sapienza di Roma. These qualified personnel are called upon to facilitate as much as possible the encounters between patients and doctors, a job that is often not simple.

The project also avails itself of the presence of a scientific committee, composed of experts from the private sector, from public health services, and from the University. The committee members periodically organize activities for informing, training, and raising awareness on the theme of forced migrants. Today, the services offered by SaMiFo are a resource and reference point for hundreds of men and women asylum seekers, refugees, and victims of torture that present themselves daily at outpatient clinics—here they can seek out general medicine, psychiatry, psychology, gynecology, and legal medicine.