From Syria to Iraq, from Poland to Albania, and then Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. The San Donato group continues to open and manage hospital facilities in many foreign countries, even in difficult political conditions. Health development thus also becomes a formidable tool to help normalize international relations.
“If you want the love of the people to build schools and hospitals.” Mother Teresa of Calcutta knew how to translate the cardiac beat of the planet into words. The consideration has even more value today, in the season of the return wars and permanent fibrillations, where the weakest of the conflicts pay the greatest price. Schools and hospitals, education and health, something that escapes the diplomacy of governments but not to the sensitivity and foresight of the person who wears a shirt. Thus was born the “health diplomacy” which in recent years sees our country at the forefront in creating and managing hospitals, care centers, university clinics, clinics in the most inflamed places in the world. Where there is no embassy, here it excels Italy with a hospital vocation, the one that lavish to heal the deepest wounds.
The example is all in a map. It seems that photographers the successes of the British Empire of the nineteenth century, instead it is the mirror of those of the San Donato group led by the Rotelli family, with President Angelino Alfano: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Libya, soon Syria. And then Albania and Poland, the last “conquests”. Our Italian is winning in the Arab world thanks “to the Kamel effect”, the vice -president of the Kamel Ghribi group, Tunisian manager and authentic diplomatic of Italian health. With his innate ability (the interlocutors testify) “to build consent, to enter a room and put everyone in agreement”. The internationalization of health is a goal of many, but in some areas of the world not everyone has codes to enter.
In the Middle East, the Northern European have always struggled for out of market costs, In French and English Maghrebs are kept away, the whole area is off limits for Americans. And here on this complicated geopolitical chessboard Italy has good game, especially with the international prestige of the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, the flagship of the group.
Ghribi had announced the strategy a few years ago at the Ambrosetti forum in Cernobbio: «I am firmly convinced that the Mediterranean region with the neighboring countries is strategically crucial for Europe and Italy. You just have to stop considering the north bank and the south bank as opposite. My idea is simple and perhaps revolutionary: the Mediterranean is a sea that unites, not that divides. It is a zipper between peoples, cultures, economies. It is necessary to invest in dialogue and diplomacy, economic and health. ” To then add: «The keywords are cooperation, multilateralism, free trade. You have to go back to work together today, so it will be more difficult and inconvenient to argue tomorrow ».
The words follow the facts and today the San Donato group (First Italian group with 158 structures, 27 hospitals, seven thousand doctors, 17 thousand collaborators, five million patients in one year, almost two billion in turnover) is also a first -rate foreign ministry. The most delicate mission took place in Syria who tries to recover after the revolution that led to the improcious of the Bashar al-Assad regime: on May 1st the leader of the Italian health company (the first to enter the battered country) met President Ahmad Al-Shara with the aim of participating in the reconstruction of Syrian health. The Italian know -how is historically solid and the corporate relationships as well.
The winning example is the Al-Najaf al-Ashraf Teaching Hospital University Hospital, entrusted a year ago to the Italian group in Najaf, Iraq, 500 beds in the Holy City, a destination for the pilgrimage of 20 million Muslims who every year pray in the mausoleum of Ali Ibn ABI Tail, cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad. Theater of battles during the American occupation, Najaf had not seen a foreigner for years even by mistake. The main hospital, built by a German group, was abandoned to himself and worked at a minimum. The Italian masterpiece was twofold: to restart the structure at full capacity and return to that part of the world the trust in the sign of solidarity.
Technicians, engineers, carpenters, doctors, Italian health managers (in all a team of 60 people) have transformed a wreck into an spaceship where people heal. The life -saving machinery, the operating rooms, restored maintenance, have restarted. Entering the San Donato group, the hospital was able to hire 130 among doctors, nurses, administrative staff. The exclamation point was the return of some Iraqi doctors who fled to Europe at the beginning of the conflict. A diplomatic success all tricolor; Today in the hall the “Bar Italia” churns out Cappuccini and Brioches for employees, patients and their relatives.
The example led the Iraqi government to replicate the operation in Bassora with the Sayyab Teaching Hospital, entrusted to the Italian group to make that hospital efficient, with European medical-managerial technologies and standards. And available to all citizens, since public health is like ours, it works like ours. The GSD also prepares the landing in the capital, Baghdad, where it will have the task of transforming an old building in the center into a private hospital. The push to concreteness comes from Ghribi, who a few months ago in the hearing by Pope Francis thus summarized the spirit of this international strategy: «It doesn’t matter to be Christian, Jewish or Muslim. It is humanity that matters, we are all born on this land to be treated with equality. I read the figures, which weigh more than words, and I wonder: where is the equality? Cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of death in the world and for these pathologies 80 percent of deaths are recorded in developing countries, where only 20 percent of the population has access to basic treatments and only 5 percent of cardiac surgery ».
A modern and ancient philosophy, which lodies in the San Raffaele DNA. Already in the mid -eighties the founder of the Don Luigi Verzé hospital sensed the importance of replicating the format in Brazil, in Salvador de Bahia. And in the poorest neighborhood, next to a hill of waste where desperate kids climbed to find something to eat, built the “Sayy Rafael”. Other than urban regeneration. On the day of the inauguration of the Poliambulatorio he said to Bettino Craxi, then Prime Minister: “Go to play the bell”. This is that he replied: “No problem Don Luigi, as a boy I was a clerics.” Even today in Bahia they argue that “there was a healthcare before the Saure Rafael and one after. Without that hospital, modern medicine would not have existed in Brazil ». They followed with various fortune health projects in India, Chile, Algeria, Cuba, Palestine, Jerusalem and Dharamsala, on the slopes of the Himalaya on the push of the Dalai Lama.
A precious legacy passed through a thousand crossings, which the San Donato group has made its own. It also metabolized it and updated it also with the landing in Poland, through the Gksd Investment Holding, where in 2023 the flag has planted first with the acquisition of the American Hearth of Poland group, then with that Scanmed group, 800 million investment. The Polish acquisitions gave life in the country to a giant of 600 thousand patients per year, with hospitals and clinics in 48 cities.
All this is added to two Smart Clinic in Egypt (in Cairo), one in Saudi Arabia (A Riad), the management of a hospital in Libya (in Tripoli), an agreement with Tunisia to hire 100 nurses in the group. Until the most recent Memorandum, the one signed a month ago with the Albania of the President just re-elected Edi Rama for a three-year collaboration (training and research) between the University of Medicine of Tirana and the Mother Teresa University Hospital Center on the one hand, the San Raffaele Hospital and the Vita-Salute University, the scientific flagship of the San Donato Group on the other. On that occasion, vice -president Paolo Rotelli underlined: “Favoring excellence in medical training and scientific research strengthens relations between peoples”.
Health diplomacy helps the world to heal.
