The 2025 Agenas report crowns the Mestre healthcare facility as the best in Italy for clinical performance. This result represents a potential strategic lever for urban regeneration of the area, provided that the current academic “dissonances” are overcome and a real synergy with Venice is created.
By Maria Laura Faccini
Mestre’s hospital has been awarded a national record of great value: not only in terms of healthcare, but also for urban development. The recent Agenas 2025 report ranked the Ospedale dell’Angelo in Mestre first overall in Italy for clinical excellence, a significant leap from its already excellent previous position. This success goes beyond recognition for the professionals and it can be a driving force for the development of the entire city.
Excellent hospitals like the Ospedale dell’Angelo immediately become urban magnets: they guarantee quality of life, safety, and attract high-level expertise. Families, businesses, and skilled workers are increasingly choosing where to live based on the quality of healthcare services offered. Mestre now has a strategic advantage to leverage.
THE UNIVERSITY HUB: RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES
This potential does not automatically translate into development. In the case of Mestre, while the hospital remains at the top nationally, the Medicine and Surgery degree course offered the University of Padua’s School of Medicine has begun being taught in Venice, with a projected six hundred students by 2030, and Unicamillus [an international medical university in Rome] has activated a Master’s degree course in Medicine and Surgery on the island of Lido.
These choices respond to the need to revitalize the historical center but risk weakening the natural link between university education and high-level clinical practice.
The challenge is to transform this apparent dissonance – Venice as the academic hub, Mestre as the clinical and technological hub of the metropolitan city – into an opportunity
PROJECT “HEALTH CITY”: THE STRATEGY FOR MESTRE
To seize this opportunity, a clear strategy is needed: Mestre can build its own strong healthcare identity by specializing in highly innovative clinical areas and valuing research. The goal would be to become a natural location for internships, specialization schools, and joint scientific projects, creating a true “health district” – a Health City – around the hospital.
This development would require targeted urban planning interventions: efficient mobility, housing for specialists, spaces for biomedical startups, and integrated services. The hospital must not remain an anonymous area on the periphery of the city but rather become a vibrant new neighborhood of modern Mestre.
Effective communication is fundamental: showcasing the hospital’s excellence certified by Agenas, organizing scientific events, engaging citizens and the media, and making the hospital a central element of Mestre’s contemporary identity. From an urban planning perspective, there is a need to better integrate the hospital into the city through efficient transportation, high-quality public spaces, and adequate services.
The objective is clear: to transform the recognition of clinical excellence into a project for quality urban development. If this can be achieved by the next municipal administration, and if academic initiatives and activities are not the exclusive prerogative of the historical city, or instead relegated to the waterfront, Mestre can make a qualitative leap, positioning itself as one of the most attractive and modern cities in Northern Italy, stemming the drift towards becoming a “city with a tourist vocation” which, amidst the indifference of too many, seems to be its only destiny.
Mestre would no longer merely the eternal periphery of Venice, but rather a vital center that leverages now nationally recognized: excellent healthcare services for the benefit of the local community. This would create a prospect for genuine collaboration between the two cities, no longer based on opposing poles but on common ground for future development.
Source: Ytali Global
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