
The "Growing together at the Sant’Anna” project's aim is to restore the Turin Sant'Anna Hospital's Newborn Ward, bringing it up to international quality standards.
Structural and organizational solutions that can encourage a more humane and familiar environment for providing care and promoting psychological and physical wellbeing, of both users, i.e. children and families, and all people who work there every day, are sought.
Due to the nature of the Newborn ward's guests, a structure was created to support the babies' necessities in the best possible way under a medical point of view, but also under the point of view of psycho-emotional and family relationships.
The ward follows the principles of “care” and “family-centred care”: this means considering the newborn at 360°, ensuring the young patients can have some sort of normal life even inside a structure that is not their home and that can often have a sombre atmosphere.
Practical ways to reach this aim include facilitating parents' access to the ward, both in terms of time (“free access”), and of environment, making the process more human and personal. Parents must be involved in every aspect of the children’s stay at the hospital, and the family's love and support, together with constant physical contact (the so-called kangaroo mothering technique), become essential ingredients in the process of treating the newborn.
The main aim of the project is reaching a correct relationship between functionality and comfort and the newborn ward is one of the vital steps in the process.
The main requisites of the environment, to allow the Hospital to resemble a family setting as much as possible, are highly personalized furnishings, to make the environment welcoming and user-friendly, and the presence of cutting edge equipment for the treatment of the children.