The official opening was held today of the brand new community medical center of the Fatebenefratelli Sacco hospital, in Via Serlio 8, at the heart of Milan’s historic and multi-ethnic Municipality 4, with a population of approximately 161,000 residents.
The new center provides one of the city’s most densely populated districts with a new site for the Vaccination Center and the Family Doctor Selection Office.
Built with generous contributions from the Prelios Group and Aertermica, the facility houses two vital community services in a single structure: Family Doctor Selection (the office that endorses people's right to use the regional health service) with 6 user windows, and a Vaccination Center with 4 lines for adults, the elderly, pregnant women and children aged 0 – 18 years.
Every year, the Vaccination Center carries out around 40,000 vaccinations for Municipality 4 residents, while the Family Doctor Selection Office processes around 400,000 procedures through its front-office user windows and online through a special portal.
The new facility houses two community services that were no longer able to respond adequately to local requirements, the Selection Office in Via Molise and the Vaccination Center in Corso Lodi.
“The new site enables us to keep up with the times by offering a functionally improved important service for an area of Milan with a large population,” said the Lombardy Regional Authority Deputy Chair and Regional Minister for Welfare, Letizia Moratti. “This is a development in line with the reform of our regional healthcare legislation, whose goal is to provide community healthcare closely tailored to people and their needs. The fact that from today Municipality 4 has a facility of this type that guarantees greater efficiency and was realized through the collaboration of the public and the private sectors is certainly an added value. And the mural donated to the new center conveys the message of a place where fears and anxieties can be turned into a smile.”
“The Covid-19 pandemic has shown everyone the fundamental importance of a territorial network that operates correctly and efficiently, so our success in creating a new medical center during the healthcare emergency is something we can all be proud of and a strong symbol of a new start,” said Alessandro Visconti, General Manager of the Fatebenefratelli Sacco Hospital. “The project is particularly commendable because it has been realized in the community, avoiding the need for residents to travel to more distant hospitals. So we are very grateful to Prelios and Aertermica for helping us deliver this user service, a demonstration once again of the importance of collaboration between public and private enterprise in creating essential healthcare facilities for the well-being of us all.”
The center in Via Serlio is intended as a point of reference and support for Milan in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, by providing a new facility in the community.
Prelios Group Chairman Fabrizio Palenzona said: “Since the start of the pandemic, our Group and its employees felt they had to take part in the community's effort to contain and defeat Covid. We decided to provide support for Milan's Fatebenefratelli Sacco hospital, a center of medical excellence, by contributing to the purchase of equipment required by the wards most directly engaged in the fight against the pandemic. Today, inspired by a reasonable hope of a return to ‘normality’, we are at the side of the Fatebenefratelli Sacco once again, this time for the creation of an important new vaccination center. Prelios, and all the people who work in the Group, see the initiative as a small gesture of affection for our fellow citizens, and an expression of gratitude to the men and women of this great hospital who are always in the front line in safeguarding our health with professionalism, courage and generosity.”
The new Center has been designed to be functionally efficient but also attractive and welcoming: a key contribution in this sense came from artist Alessandro Bandin, a member of the We Are Urban Milano voluntary association, which has donated a brightly colored mural to the Fatebenefratelli Sacco's facility in Via Serlio.
“The WAU! Milano voluntary association is delighted to offer this work to the community,” declared Andrea Amato, President of We Are Urban Milano. “It is an honor for us to contribute, in this creative way, to the improvement of the community.”
"The mural was designed and painted not only for children, but for the child in all of us: the child that appears at those times, in those places, when childhood fears re-emerge, for example in a hospital waiting room as we wait for our turn for an injection, a vaccination,” explained Alessandro Bandin, the artist who painted the mural and a member of the We Are Urban Milano voluntary association. “With this in mind, at the center of the mural there is a huge sea turtle, floating between the water and the air. From the turtle's shell rises a beacon, a symbol of safety, of certainty, the point of stability we all turn to in doubt and trouble. Because the beacon is on the shell of a turtle, it is moving constantly, and we, as fragile as a paper boat, must follow and find our own point of stability, which changes, alters, vanishes or moves, but is always inside us to provide comfort.”