A new location for Gemelli Medical Center

A new, beautiful, locally connected and welcoming facility to assist people in the last earthly phase of their existence, when silence, nature and the closeness of loved ones can accompany days among the most special in the life of a family and a person: this is all the new headquarters of the Gemelli Medical Center, the benefit company under Università Cattolica, inaugurated on November 13 in Rome.

In historical continuity with its previous location in Via Pineta Sacchetti, the center offers palliative care to 30 people in residential care and 120 in home care, as a private facility accredited with ASL Roma 1, under the Lazio Regional Health Service, now in new environments designed to respond even more to the needs of patients and their families.

“Gemelli Medical Center is expanding its healthcare offerings with new areas and activities that will be agreed upon with Università Cattolica, in collaboration with Fondazione Policlinico Gemelli” ‒ said Adv. Pier Francesco Meneghini, President of Gemelli Medical Center, opening the inaugural meeting ‒ “The strategic partnership between Policlinico, Gemelli Isola Tiberina and Gemelli a Casa, our health network company that will be increasingly characterized by a multidisciplinary approach to home care that focuses on new digital technologies and telemedicine, will also be enhanced. The center we are inaugurating today, therefore, represents a quantum leap in providing concrete answers to the needs of people in need of palliative care and their family members, achieved in part through the large green spaces, interiors and rooms designed to provide adequate and comfortable hospitality also for caregivers.”

“In view of the year of the Jubilee of Hope, desired by Pope Francis, it is difficult to imagine a more tangible sign of hope than this endeavour,” said Università Cattolica Rector Professor Elena Beccalli. “The new center looks to the future both in terms of the availability of technologically enriched spaces and in terms of medical expertise, in collaboration with Policlinico Gemelli. But the structure is also strongly anchored in our roots: I remember the text in which Father Agostino Gemelli, founder of our Athenaeum, explained why there was a need for a Catholic-inspired medical school, thinking about care in the final part of the life of the sick person.”

“We are pleased that the history of this facility has already begun. I am thinking of all the families who, in the terminal stage of their loved one’s life, are forced to put themselves on a waiting list to receive treatment. Coming to meet this moment, I think, is another step to say who the man is for us until his last breath” ‒ commented S. E. Msgr. Benoni Ambarus, Bishop Delegate for Health Pastoral Care of the Diocese of Rome.

The inauguration ceremony concluded in the Chapel of the new structure, in a moment of prayer and sharing of the artistic and structural conception of the new place of pause and spiritual refreshment, enriched by the works of painter Giovanni Frangi and sculptor Mario Airò, at which S. E. Msgr. Claudio Giuliodori, General Ecclesiastical Assistant of Università Cattolica imparted the blessing: “The basic idea behind the design of this structure” ‒ the bishop said ‒ “is the link between earth and sky. Somehow here we experience one of the fundamental phases of life, full of meaning and synthesis of existence itself; it is a place that we propose with the Christian’s gaze open to all, in which we can grasp the dimension of a life that does not end and opens to the eternal.”