Department IntroductionInter-university CentresTESIS

TESIS

TESIS “Systems and Technologies for Healthcare, Social and Educational Facilities” is an inter-university research centre dedicated to developing tools, techniques and methodologies to improve the structural framework of healthcare and social services, and to promote the wellbeing and health of citizens, through research activities covering all stages of the construction process: from planning, design and construction to management, use and maintenance.

TESIS is structured as a multidisciplinary scientific network, comprising researchers, designers, environmental psychologists, doctors, economists, historians, sociologists and technical physicists affiliated with the University of Florence and the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.

The centre possesses specialist disciplinary and professional expertise in the following areas:

• planning and scheduling;
• building design;
• services engineering;
• technical physics and environmental hygiene;
• public health;
• technical standards;
• tendering and concession procedures;
• quality control;
• construction economics;
• economic evaluation of projects;
• cost estimation;
• psychology and sociology;
• medical humanities.

The “Systems and Technologies for Healthcare, Social Care and Education” THESIS promotes and supports the exchange of knowledge and collaboration between lecturers and researchers engaged in research and training activities on topics relating to systems and technologies within their specific areas of interest.

The aim of TESIS, as set out in its founding documents and progressively expanded over the years, is in fact to establish a permanent network for the exchange of information with public and private bodies, organisations and institutions, and to stimulate innovation in the processes involved in the construction of healthcare and social care facilities, with particular reference to hospitals and training centres.

TESIS’s work now places an ever-greater emphasis on international scientific exchanges and collaborations.

TESIS’s research aims to develop theoretical and practical insights that are useful for the design of healthcare and social care facilities, ranging from the scale of individual buildings to that of the entire system of local community services.

To this end, TESIS develops methodological and practical tools to support the effective design of healthcare and social care facilities from a typological, organisational-functional and technological perspective.
The main driving force behind the development of TESIS’s research activities is the widespread recognition of the strategic importance that healthcare and social care infrastructure will assume in the near future in relation to:

• alle radicali trasformazioni cui sarà soggetta la transizione della sanità dalla cura della malattia alla promozione della salute attraverso l’enfatizzazione della medicina predittiva e personalizzata, l’impiego di tecnologie sempre più sofisticate e l’impatto effettuale della ricerca traslazionale;
• alla progressiva importanza che assumeranno le strutture sociali per garantire il benessere dei cittadini;
• ruolo strategico che, in tale contesto, svolgeranno le strutture per la formazione a tutti i livelli.

In line with the expected practical nature of the results, the specific objectives of TESIS’s research activities relating to health and social care settings are:

• the identification – in light of the specific characteristics of the national and international context and future strategic projections – of the organisational, managerial, spatial and functional frameworks underlying the types of service under specific consideration;
• an assessment of the potential and limitations inherent in the current regulatory framework governing social and healthcare planning and programme development;
• the identification of emerging trends in the healthcare sector and in social policies and rights, with a view to establishing a reference framework within which to situate decision-making of a more strictly technical and planning nature;
• the identification of organisational and operational procedures currently in use – and envisaged for the future – within the community context, in the form of initiatives to promote citizens’ health and well-being;
• the development of innovative models designed to support and promote the process of genuine integration – from an organisational, functional and typological perspective – of the innovative services and provisions that characterise the facilities of specific interest;
• the development of operational tools to support decision-making by practitioners.