Health Tourism and Thermal Heritage: Assessing Italian Spas with Innovative Multidisciplinary Tools

Abstract

The recent evolution of European health policies and tourism market trends highlights the increasing attention to health promotion strategies along with healthcare tourism innovation. Thermal industry, considered as a set of places of care, represents a possible field for the integration of territorial health tourism services, thanks to its border-crossing connotation and its recognition by the European Commission as main subsector of health tourism. Although Italy represents one of the most attractive European health tourism destination, the thermal sector is still underdeveloped, in extremely heterogeneous and fragmented conditions, unable to catalyze socioeconomic potentialities as well as optimize the use of relevant built heritage. Therefore, it is necessary to develop reliable tools and decision-making models for improving the sector in terms of health, tourism and territorial qualities. Starting from previous studies, the aim of the article is to present the development of archiTHERMability tool and discuss the results of the application on different typologies of thermal facilities. The methodological path followed three steps: (a) a review was conducted among different assessment tools to understand the state of the art; (b) the existing Italian thermal heritage was mapped, and appropriate criteria and macroareas were selected and weighted based on interviews structured with multidisciplinary experts in architecture/territory/management areas; (c) the tool was tested on two different categories of thermal facilities. The tool application on four different thermal facilities highlighted, as expected, the relevance of the managerial field. Nevertheless, the importance of the territorial context and its levels of accessibility plays a fundamental role in the structure's characterization. ArchiTHERMability hence represents an innovative tool for analyzing and understanding the Italian thermal heritage potentialities. Further investigation is necessary to test the tool on a wider sample and with different weights of criteria.

Geography Matters, But… Evolving Success Factors for Nature-Oriented Health Tourism within Selected Alpine Destinations

“…A further precondition for a successful, future-oriented development of health tourism is the ongoing recording and analysis of (health) tourism structures in the form of monitoring [ 80 , 81 ]. No information was provided for the health resort Aix-les-Bains, as no data were available.…”

Adaptive Reuse Practices and Sustainable Urban Development: Perspectives of Innovation for European Historic Spa Towns

“…RP III, carried out on behalf of the Fondazione per la Ricerca Scientifica Termale-FoRST, investigated tools and strategies to promote the knowledge, management and enhancement of the Italian built heritage connected to thermalism through multi-criteria decision making methodologies [87], to investigate its potential integration with touristic or service-related territorial networks and, in particular, with the one of the National Healthcare System [88]. Through a series of case studies, the research highlighted a wide margin of an overlapping and a possible integration in terms of mission, architectural features and territorial distribution between thermal baths and Health Centres: multipurpose health facilities able to provide basic social and health services, such as prevention and rehabilitation, health education and social services, to all citizens, integrating, as territorial infrastructure, the primary hospital network [89].…”

“…System [88]. Through a series of case studies, the research highlighted a wide margin of an overlapping and a possible integration in terms of mission, architectural features and territorial distribution between thermal baths and Health Centres: multipurpose health facilities able to provide basic social and health services, such as prevention and rehabilitation, health education and social services, to all citizens, integrating, as territorial infrastructure, the primary hospital network [89].…”

Healthy and Sustainable Hospital Evaluation—A Review of POE Tools for Hospital Assessment in an Evidence-Based Design Framework

“…Several articles have been published about the comparison of different tools in various settings [13,21,24,58,59,82,83] but this is the first time a sample of tools have been appraised from an EBD perspective and considerations about the presence of sustainable and/or health related indicators have been provided.…”