DESIGNING NEW HEALTHCARE FACILITIES IN A EUROPEAN FRAME

Healthcare is one of the most important occupational sectors in Europe, as well as a catalyst for substantial investments (up to 50% of national spending), but few studies are aimed at assessing the social and economic repercussions of health policies; if it is true that the priority objectives for the health sector are centered on therapeutic efficiency, the awareness begins to take shape that the benefits induced in other sectors such as social well-being and economic stability are of great interest and that, therefore, the health care system plays a key role in inclusive and equitable growth and development at the national level (Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO 2018). Even the common ideology that associates competitiveness with efficiency and which, consequently, encourages the private sector, appears to have been greatly reduced already by the analysis of the 2009 WHO report Investing in Hospital of the Future, in which the opportunity emerges to abandon the criterion of beds for sizing hospital investments and enhancing the hospital’s relationship with local services. Hospitals should not be considered exclusively infrastructures for the provision of health services because they play a central role in the economy and in the development of the territory, they support research and training programs and are integrated into the local settlement by activating a flywheel of activity that conditions the social structure and the economic growth. […]