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.
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The team that performed the first hemodialysis in Spain, with Dr. Lluís Callís as head of the Service.
On May 6, 1971, the first pediatric hemodialysis in Spain was performed at Vall d'Hebron Hospital.
Hemodialysis was performed by professionals from the Pediatric Nephrology Service, created in 1966. This service, directed from the beginning by Dr. Lluís Callís, trained in France at a time when this specialty did not exist in Spain, was the first to be created in Spain and for many years the only one. And Vall d’Hebron was the first Spanish center to have a pediatric hemodialysis unit.
In addition to Dr. Callís, the Service had Dr. Francisco Castelló as an assistant physician and, a few years later, Drs. Angel Vila (1970), Enrique Vilaplana (1971) and Albert Pi-Ferrer (1972) joined as assistants and Dr. Gladys de Fortuny as head of laboratory and functional tests.
Initially, the Service was located in the semi-basement of the Children's Hospital, but in 1971 it was moved to the second floor, where the children's hemodialysis room was inaugurated.
Hemodialysis is a technique used when the kidneys are not working properly. It consists of filtering, through a machine (the dialyzer), the toxins and fluids from the blood, thus replacing the functions performed by healthy kidneys. In order to extract the patient's blood and send it to the dialysis machine, a special vascular access is required with two blood circulation channels; through one channel, blood is sent to the machine to be cleaned, and through the other, the already purified blood returns.
This technique began to be used in adults, and when it was first performed on pediatric patients in 1971, there was no material suitable for these patients, so it had to be adapted. And it was the nurses themselves who cut the catheters and spliced them to make them shorter, adapted the filters... In addition, sterilization had to be done by hand and the techniques used were tolerated much worse than those used today... all of this added complexity to a technique that was very pioneering at the time.
Hemodialysis was very long, lasting about 6 hours, and had to be done on alternate days, so that some children, when they needed hemodialysis, were admitted to the hospital for months, because they came from very far away, often from outside Catalonia, since in many provinces of the State there was no hemodialysis equipment.
A few years after the first hemodialysis, kidney transplants began to be performed, offering a more definitive therapeutic option to these patients with severe renal failure who until then had depended on dialysis to survive.
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