“We help and treat the most fragile people, the disadvantaged, those who live on the margins in situations of vulnerability, but offering them an excellent health facility that many from the outside have compared, with our great pride, to a private Swiss clinic”.
The Misericordes clinic is located in the heart of the former Lingotto worker district in Turin, a few steps from the first Eataly and Green Pea complex and from the historic Fiat buildings. In the headquarters in via Baiardi created by the Misericordes voluntary association and born from the social Agora, many arrive, reported by the charitable organizations linked to the Curia and by the listening and reception centers such as Caritas and Sermig, in this summer of the post -pandemic.
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With all the limitations and fears still present for infections from Covid-19, these months are among the hardest ever, especially for families and the elderly in poverty, for the homeless, for migrants, for those who have lost their work and found himself without any form of sustenance.
A team of volunteer doctors and nurses, including primary and specialists, is available for patients to provide qualified and free medical, nursing and physiotherapy assistance. Entering the clinic, the first aspect that strikes you is the extreme cleanliness of all the rooms, from the reception where check-in takes place to the reporting room, from the pediatric clinic for which Dr. Iginio Arboatti, a whole life dedicated to pediatrics, to all the other outpatient rooms with orthopedics, nephrology, endocrinology, thoraco-pulmonary surgery and finally the dental office, a particularly requested service, which has an X-ray device equipped with a digital system to acquire and save the images directly on PC.
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“Let’s try to keep up with the challenges of our time that require closeness to those who find it most difficult to live – he explains Massimiliano Sings, president of the non-profit organization Misericordes – this clinic was designed and built thinking of those who find themselves in conditions of serious discomfort and who are welcomed and cared for in these rooms, but without ever losing sight of the attention to detail, for the context and therefore for the environment that must be modern and avant-garde as regards medical technologies and instruments. The fact that users are people in need and disadvantaged does not mean that they should be treated in a less dignified way than other patients. Indeed, they deserve an excellent service that we try to guarantee them with the support of the Curia, public and private bodies and donations from benefactors. We started out as a nursing clinic and then evolved into more areas of health care. Every day we are confronted as operators and medical team with the new forms of poverty that affect not only the families of immigrants and foreigners but also the Italian ones. In agreement with Caritas we have established a symbolic cost for the activation of these services equal to 1 euro for a single visit with one of our specialists and 5 euro for the dental visit in consideration of the high number of requests and reports that we receive for this service. On the anti-Covid front we have put in place all the prevention measures of contagions with sanitation costs of the premises, measurement of body temperature, disinfectant and hand sanitizer dispensers, but unfortunately we were unable to provide the regular service during the lockdowns. As Misericordes in those periods we were committed to the outside with a campaign for the distribution of masks, hand gels and personal hygiene kits to help the most fragile people living in the city “.
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