Turin Health Park: the project that looks to the medicine of the future

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) - Not a large hospital, but a health centre where patients are cared for, where research is carried out, a centre where companies are also located, and which manages to generate income and employment. This, in short, is the objective of the Health Park of the Piedmontese capital. An enormous project, which should unite three large hospitals in Turin: the Molinette, Sant'Anna and the Cto. An ambitious project that the Unione Industriali Torino, the Politecnico di Torino, the University of Turin (Department of Law and School of Medicine) and the Centro Einaudi have made the protagonist of a series of meetings dedicated to conveying the importance that this pole could have for the territory, drawing upa summary decalogue of the project. In the context of Torino Capitale della Cultura d'impresa 2024, the meeting 'Health, Park and Development' analysed the concept of health as an engine of territorial development, bringing virtuous Italian and European examples. "Health responds to very strong needs in contemporary society. And this will be increasingly the case with the ageing of the population and longer life expectancy,' explained Giorgio Marsiaj, president of Unione Industriali Torino. 'Guaranteeing all citizens, without differences in income, access to adequate health services is one of the founding values of Europe: a principle that positively differentiates us from all other countries. I am convinced that this is not only an ethical requirement but a necessary condition to ensure that we have a truly fair and therefore sustainable development'. According to the president, 'we need to overturn the conception of health services from being a mere "cost" or "use of resources" to being an economic and social "opportunity for development"'.

The Health Park proposal envisages a new pole where health personnel can work and train in better conditions, a place that will contribute, with its cutting-edge research, to the development of the city and the entire Region. An area of 127 thousand square metres, at the foot of the Region's skyscraper, with a total of over a thousand beds, to which another 10 thousand square metres dedicated to research and teaching should be added at a later date. A centre that will offer citizens advanced, more effective and safer services, safeguarding and expanding the fundamental right to health. Not only that, a place capable of meeting the challenges of tomorrow's medicine without reducing the availability of care because, as the Unione Industriali Torino decalogue states, to make a good hospital it is not enough to have good and motivated health workers, but technically advanced infrastructures are needed. The medicine of the future, in fact, is based on research, development and technological innovation, elements that only a special context - committed to fostering exchanges between the university and businesses - can guarantee. The new pole will then have toattract students, services, investments and work, it will have to be useful for the community: fundamental, in this sense, is the idea of devoting particular attention to the architectural and technological elements of the structure - a task, this, of specific competence of the Polytechnic - elements that will have to guarantee the hospital a sustainable environmental and economic impact. "The message we want to send with this project," Giorgio Marsiaj explains, "is not that private healthcare should replace public healthcare: there must be, in general, a role for both players. The public sector must maintain a central role, healthcare must be public, but there must be no ideological opposition to the private sector; on the contrary, we hope for an integration between the two sectors also to attract new investments'.

The Turin project is not unique; on the contrary, it draws on two examples that have demonstrated the validity of such an ambitious design. The first is an Italian case, namely theHumanitas Clinical Institute in Rozzano (province of Milan), a highly specialised polyclinic, a centre for scientific and clinical research and a teaching centre of the Humanitas University. It is currently an international point of reference for research on tumours and immunodegenerative diseases. The second is instead a French case: it is the Eurosanté Park in Lille which, starting out as a hospital centre, has become an all-round health centre, where research is carried out and where large companies have settled. "We chose Lille as an example," emphasises Luca Pignatelli, head of the economic studies centre of Unione Industriali Torino, "because it was a textile area in decline, then 20 years ago they built this park," focusing on research, development, innovation and winking at the medicine of the future. "In Lille, even the traditional textile industry has found business space in the park, dedicating itself to new medical textiles. This could be a cue for us, for example in the field of robotics'. An important project, not simply a large hospital, but what could be 'a way to relaunch the development of Turin'.