EDUCatt Director’s open letter to the collegiate community
In view of the re-opening of the Colleges and Residences after the summer break, EDUCatt, in collaboration with the Università Cattolica, is committed to guaranteeing the best conditions for welcoming students, paying the utmost attention to all aspects of their stay in the facilities and in particular to the health and safety of its guests.
The Director of the EDUCatt Foundation, Angelo Giornelli, addresses all the guests of the Colleges and Residences, reminding them of the correct behaviour to adopt and the main directives to follow in the facilities with the aim of guaranteeinghospitality in the pursuit of personal growth and the development of transversal skills.
Below is the Director’s letter:
The choice of the College is certainly a valuable opportunity to enrich one’s university career and to fully experience the period of study, and today even more so it is an invitation to think about the future with serenity: in this perspective, EDUCatt, in agreement with the University, will continue to work to guarantee the best conditions for students, in a panorama that we hope will be quieter but which will be addressed, as always, with the utmost attention also to the health and safety of the guests in the facilities.
In this regard, I would like to point out that the recently published vademecum , available in the special area www.educatt.it/covid-19 together with all the other documents created to manage the emergency, will continue to be updated and used as a mutual responsibility tool, with the aim of minimising risks within the collegiate communities. The document, conceived for the offer managed directly by EDUCatt, has been shared and finds similar measures in all the facilities of the Foundation’s housing proposal.
A working table made up of experts and senior figures from the Foundation has also been set up and stabilised from the outset, for the timely verification of best practices on a case-by-case basis. The safety protocol monitoring and verification group, made up of specialists from the Foundation’s audit activities, was also set up within EDUCatt in order to ascertain the consistency of the interventions and actions in place on time.
The protocols set up, which are adapted from time to time, will also allow for calm management in cases where there are double rooms or shared bathrooms for several rooms, and also in the undesirable case of symptomatic cases.
The essentials for these aspects include
- the extraordinary cleaning and sanitising of rooms and facilities prior to resumption, and an increase in the practice of sanitising and cleaning rooms compared to what is normally planned;
- the downgrading to single rooms of those double rooms that do not allow for adequate bed spacing between heads;
- the provision to users of the products necessary to sanitise the facilities after use, with specific recommendations;
- the frequent ventilation of the rooms (recommendations are posted on each window reminding people to ventilate the room frequently)
- the indication in common areas of the maximum contemporary capacity;
- the availability in each facility of a number of rooms for the management of possible contagions or preventive quarantines;
- where appropriate, for students of the Faculty of Medicine, the relocation of guests by floors, on the basis of hospital attendance;
- an increase in information and training on the use of protective equipment; in this regard, a number of targeted events are already planned for the September returns – together with the welcome kit containing masks and a vademecum
- a reminder of the correct behaviour to be adopted when leaving the facility, so that each guest is able to responsibly preserve their own health and that of the other guests at the College/Residence;
- making boarders responsible for immediately alerting College Management in the event of any Covid-19 alarm symptoms.
With these and other measures that we will put in place, and which we will continue to communicate punctually, I believe I can hope that the Colleges will remain as safe and welcoming places as ever, able to offer the best conditions for a humanly rich and enriching training experience.
Angelo Giornelli