We are the combination of four hospitals: the General Hospital, the Children’s Hospital, the Women’s Hospital and the Traumatology, Rehabilitation and Burns Hospital. We are part of the Vall d’Hebron Barcelona Hospital Campus: a world-leading health park where healthcare plays a crucial role.
Patients are the centre and the core of our system. We are professionals committed to quality care and our organizational structure breaks down the traditional boundaries between departments and professional groups, with an exclusive model of knowledge areas.
Would you like to know what your stay at Vall d'Hebron will be like? Here you will find all the information.
The commitment of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital to innovation allows us to be at the forefront of medicine, providing first class care adapted to the changing needs of each patient.
Two members of the Neurosurgery team evaluating some images in 1998.
Neurosurgery Service team in 1981.
Currently, Vall d'Hebron's neurosurgeons have the most advanced technology to perform interventions with maximum precision and safety.
Despite the limited technical resources available in the 1950s, neurosurgery had a place in the Hospital from the beginning. The Service was a pioneer in Catalonia and the Spanish State.
When talking about the beginnings of neurosurgery at the Vall d’Hebron Hospital, it is necessary to do so in the plural, because there were two teams that were created, in 1956, led by Dr. Adolfo Ley and Dr. Eduard Tolosa, respectively. Both had applied for the first positions as head of the Social Security Neurosurgery team, announced in a competition that was published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on January 10, 1956. With this call, Neurosurgery was recognized for the first time in the Spanish State within hospital medicine. The two positions in Barcelona were awarded to Dr. Ley Gracia and Dr. Tolosa, who created at the Vall d’Hebron Hospital the first Neurosurgery Service in Catalonia and the third in the State with two teams led by each of them.
At first, the two teams worked separately, until, after the retirement of Dr. Tolosa, were unified into a single team, under the direction of Dr. Ley. When he retired, Dr. Jacas took over, who maintained the unified Service. In the early 1980s, Dr. Enrique Rubio took over the direction of the Service and created three care sections, each in one of the three areas that already formed the Vall d’Hebron hospital complex at that time: the General Hospital, the Traumatology Hospital and the Children’s Hospital. To these three sections was added, in 1992, the Neurotraumatology and Neurosurgery Research Unit (UNINN), which is now part of the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute.
The Neurosurgery Service was also the first specialist school in Neurosurgery in the State, attached in 1975 to the Autonomous University of Barcelona, formally established a few months after the death of Dr. Ley. This school was later adapted to the system of training physicians through the MIR route. Adaptation to the MIR system greatly improved the preparation of professionals, since, until then, doctors in training (what would now be residents) practically only watched and did not practice.
In its beginnings, Neurosurgery had very few resources to evaluate the injuries that patients presented before interventions. In fact, the only imaging test that could be done was to inject air through a lumbar puncture and in an X-ray see how the air was distributed in the skull and from there to intuit the type of injury and its location.
Then the scanner was developed, which, although much less precise than now, already provided much more information and allowed us not to have to intervene almost blindly. Vall d’Hebron has had a scanner since 1978.
Currently, the Neurosurgery Service applies the most advanced technologies and a multidisciplinary approach.
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