Care, teaching, research.
Our mission for over 80 years

Niguarda is a big urban hospital with medical and social skills for care in the region. It is the center for all clinical and surgical fields for adults and children. It is based in Milan and serves the Lombardy Region and all of Italy.

The combination of these two facts tells us what its goal is: to combine professional care with local health and social care, working together with everyone who is involved in protecting the health of citizens.

Newsweek, an American magazine, says that it will be the only center in Italy to make the “top 50” list of the best hospitals in the world in 2020.

It opened on October 10, 1939, and has changed over time. In the last ten years, it has gone through a complicated structural and organizational change that has been driven by multidisciplinarity, technology, and integration.

Its name is based on four odd things about it:

•  Complete assistance

Niguarda has 40 operating rooms, 350 outpatient offices, over 70 wards, and 1,167 beds. With a multidisciplinary approach, we treat all diseases in adults and children.

• Treatment of highly complex pathologies

The hospital is able to handle very complicated diseases in a unique way because of its experience in emergency care and trauma, as well as its multidisciplinary approach and ultra-specialized activities.

• Continuity of care

Niguarda is involved in managing the full treatment process for long-term patients, even when they aren’t in the hospital. This is based on the idea that social welfare services should continue even after a person leaves the hospital.

• Research and training pole

Professionals study, try things out, and do research because they want to keep making care better. This is why Niguarda is a center for scientific study and a draw for professionals who need to keep their skills up-to-date in a way that is highly qualified and accredited.

Niguarda is a national and regional reference center for treating and diagnosing a wide range of diseases, including many rare ones. It is also one of the main transplant centers in Lombardy and a center of excellence for heart diseases, diseases that get worse over time, major injuries, and emergencies.

The high level of skill of the operators works well with the latest and most advanced technologies, such as MRI, PET, interventional radiology, robotic surgery, gamma knife, linear accelerators, focused ultrasound, and hyperbaric chambers.

Niguarda is a place for health care and culture. Getting to know it means meeting more than 4,500 people who work there. About 750 of them are doctors, and more than 2,000 are nurses, health and rehabilitation workers, and midwives.

NIGUARDA’S PRIMATES

There are some events that remind us of the many firsts that the hospital has done, which have led to real advances in medicine in Italy and around the world.

HISTORY

On October 10, 1939, the first person came to the hospital.

The choice to build a new hospital north of the city was part of a series of economic and infrastructure changes that had to keep up with the changing needs of the population.

To do this, professionals from different areas who had new ideas in architecture and urban planning had to be brought in. In fact, Niguarda has always been a model and a reference when it comes to hospital design. Perhaps for the first time in Italy, the pavilion style was combined with the US-style “monobloc” hospital.

Eng. Giulio Marcovigi and the arch. Giulio Arata, with Prof. Enrico Ronzani in charge of the health of the group.

More than 1,000 people worked for 7 years to finish an ambitious and innovative project. On an area of 322,000 square meters, almost 55,000 square meters were used for buildings, 132,000 square meters were used for roads and squares, and 135,000 square meters were used for gardens and lawns with pines, firs, cypresses, magnolias, elms, birches, and other trees. When it opened, the “most beautiful garden hospital in Europe,” as it was called at the time, had 1,500 beds and 775 places for staff.

What was good about the new hospital in 1939At the time, there was more focus on keeping hospital infections under control, thanks to less promiscuity among patients and better room management. The plan looked like this: it had a lot of pavilions linked by arcades and elevated roads, and the roofs were used as places to rest and recover. For moving around the hospital, an efficient network of tubes was built in the basement.
Niguarda is a place where the fine arts are protected because of the 1930s-style buildings and works of art that are still there.

Recent history

In 1978, the hospital broke away from the Policlinico Hospital of Milan and became its own thing. In 1993, it was recognized as a hospital with a high level of specialization and national importance.

At the beginning of the 2000s, Niguarda started a long-term program to update its buildings, technology, and organization. This program ended in 2014. This road led to the end of the traditional idea of a ward in favor of a multidisciplinary approach that took into account each patient’s unique needs.

From the original project’s many pavilions, the hospital has been reorganized into three big poles: the DEA block, the South block, and the North block. Each of these corresponds to a different level of care:

• emergency-urgency
• high intensity (including transplants, oncohematology and specialist surgery)
• medium intensity and maternal-infant

Some diagnostic and treatment paths at the New Hospital stand out because they are set up by mixed teams in multispecialist centers. With the change of the Lombardy Region’s social-health system in 2016, Niguarda gained a number of social-health skills and activities, and the Social-Health Territorial Company (ASST) Grande Ospedale Metropolitano Niguarda was created.