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.
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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.
Animated recreation of the patient's evolution.
The patient suffered from a serious facial deformity as a result of trauma caused by an accident.
In March 2010, Vall d’Hebron successfully performed the world’s first total face transplant, in an operation that lasted 24 hours and involved a team of more than 30 professionals.
The patient was a young man with facial trauma that prevented him from breathing, swallowing or speaking normally, which made him dependent on artificial equipment for breathing and eating.
During the surgery, the patient received new facial muscles, as well as skin, nose, cheekbones, lips, jaw, palate and teeth.
The intervention consisted of a complex procedure that combined microneurovascular reconstruction techniques and plastic surgery. The jugular veins had to be reconnected, the donor bones had to be adapted to the patient’s face and the blood vessels and all the musculature had to be joined.
The team of doctors that performed the operation was led by Dr. Joan Pere Barret. Until that time, ten face transplants had been carried out worldwide, although all had been partial.
In 2015, a multidisciplinary team from Vall d’Hebron performed a new face transplant in which the lower two-thirds of the face, neck, mouth, tongue and pharynx were reconstructed in a patient affected for 20 years by a massive arteriovenous malformation, a disease that had caused a progressive deformation of the tissues of the face. Due to the evolution of his disease, the patient had significant functional alterations such as vision problems, speech and risk of serious bleeding that put his life at risk.
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