The request for funds dates back to September 2020 but the idea dates back to the origins of Pope John. Now comes the mega allocation from the Region, and the eighth hospital tower can be built. The sum earmarked by the regional council for the expansion of Papa Giovanni is 100 million euros, a sum much higher than the 56 million that had been talked about for a long time to build a tower identical to the others on the side facing the city. And this is because the project will be much larger, so much so that its name has changed from “Eighth Tower” to “Reorganization of the hospital”.
That there should be eight towers was even foreseen in the original 1997 project, together with the fact that each of the buildings was reserved for a single department. Then things went differently also due to funding issues and we stopped at seven, but the hypothesis remained. And faced with an increase in requests, patients and activities, those spaces became increasingly necessary, until the decision to withdraw the project from the drawer immediately after Covid. The new tower will be built in the western area, close to the Giardino dell’Incontro, with the same project as the others and connections to the plate, in continuity with the architecture of the hospital. It will host the clinical and laboratory activities of onco-haematology, in which the need for space is particularly felt, especially for outpatient and therapeutic activities which do not require hospitalization for several days, such as the day-hospital for chemotherapy treatments and the Mac, a complex outpatient activity with high care intensity.
With the new construction will also come the reorganization of other spaces: Tower 2 will become entirely pediatric, therefore with no more interference between children’s and adults’ routes, while Tower 7 will be mainly dedicated to mental health, with the project to activate child and adolescent neuropsychiatry beds. The paths of other sectors such as Neurosciences, surgical specialties, transplants, cardiovascular and Medicine will also be optimized. All in a more than twenty-year perspective. The catchment area of Papa Giovanni is constantly growing, with patients also from outside the province, thus leading to a saturation of spaces. «The need for space is real – he confirms Francesco Locati, general director of the Papa Giovanni Asst —. The eighth tower will allow the implementation of advanced IT systems, crucial for the management of health data and medical research. It will not just be a place of treatment, but a center of innovation and research that looks to the future. The process is an example of how technology and strategic vision can transform healthcare infrastructure. The project demonstrates the importance of having a long-term vision. Among the programmatic lines drawn up at the beginning of our mandate, we decided to promptly implement a project proposal which in the initial formulation dated back to 2021 and related to an expansion of the spaces for the new needs”. The implementation times must comply with the three-year planning of the Region.
