On December 14, 1867, in a house located at the corner of Muntaner and Rosselló streets in what was then still the town of Gràcia —annexed to Barcelona as a neighborhood in 1897—, the first children's hospital in Spain, the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, was inaugurated. It was named after the religious Order that launched it, the Hospitaller Order of Sant Joan de Déu.
It was also one of the first hospitals in Europe that exclusively treated underage patients. It had capacity for twelve patients and opened with three Brothers in charge of the center, and six first admitted children. They were children of poor families in the city, rachitic, scrofulous or with physical disabilities, for whom the founder of the Hospitaller Order, Brother Benito Menni, saw the need for benevolent medical assistance and thought of creating a hospital in Barcelona where these children would be altruistically cared for. To do so, he had the support of the Catalan industrialist Nonito Plandolit Matamoros, a precedent for many other donors, up to today.
Menni had left his native Italy with the mission of restoring the Hospitaller Order of Sant Joan de Déu, which had disappeared in Spain in 1850, among other reasons due to the application of Mendizábal's disentailment law. Menni arrived in April 1867 in a Barcelona in full industrial development and with serious social inequalities. He stayed at the home of the Plandolit family, owners of the house that, for fifty pesetas, the Italian religious rented to open the charity hospital with which the work of Sant Joan de Déu was relaunched.
On December 14, 1867, in a house located at the corner of Muntaner and Rosselló streets in what was then still the town of Gràcia, the first children's hospital in Spain was inauguratedThat was the seed of an Order that today has eighty healthcare centers throughout the Spanish State, social, socio-health, teaching and research that serve nearly one million people a year in hospitals, mental health centers, centers for people with disabilities, for the elderly and for people in situations of vulnerability and social exclusion. The Order, in Spain, is made up of 180 Brothers, 15,000 professionals, almost 3,500 volunteers and numerous donors and benefactors.
A spectacular medical trajectory
From Gràcia, that first and small hospital center, it moved to Les Corts, in the space now occupied by the La Illa Diagonal shopping center, with many more square meters available, outdoor gardens and large windows, and there more pathologies began to be treated. And in 1973 it arrived at its current location, in Esplugues de Llobregat. Large, first-rate hospital facilities, with emergency services and more private rooms that were no longer large common rooms with many beds. Fifty years ago, it also gave way to the agreement with public healthcare, "the National Institute of Social Security, the Social Security of the time," as recalled by the superior of the community in Barcelona of the Order of Sant Joan de Déu, Joan B. Carbó.
"We felt joy and satisfaction for the hospital's relocation, which would culminate an important change, going from being a charity hospital to what characterizes it today, as a leading mother and child center in Europe", adds Carbó.
With its new location in Esplugues, the hospital grew physically, and its healthcare projection also began to do so. It already had 300 beds, expandable to 400. The impulse it received by serving the entire population led the management team to open up to most specialties.
From Gràcia, that first and small hospital center moved to Les Corts, in the space now occupied by the L'Illa Diagonal shopping center. And in 1973 it arrived at its current location, in Esplugues de LlobregatBut that ambitious challenge of attending to many more people with diverse ailments could no longer continue to be done thanks to donations from the people of Barcelona, which until then had made the hospital's activity possible, and "needed public funding," recalls Josep Caritg, now retired. Caritg began working as a nurse at the Hospital de Sant Joan de Déu in 1971, when it was still in the Les Corts neighborhood. He lived through the transfer to Esplugues, studied Medicine while working and, from night supervisor, became an associate doctor to the medical direction of the hospital.
Josep Caritg recalls that "most of the Brothers of the Hospitaller Order held some position, such as radiologists or supervisors." The community of religious, even now, has its home in a wing of the hospital, where some rooms, now free due to the progressive reduction of vocations, allow housing relatives of minors without resources, who travel from other countries to be operated on or treated at the hospital.
First pediatric emergencies and ICUs
The new hospital, as Dr. Caritg explains, "enabled spaces to receive emergencies and to assist in intensive care units (ICU)," pediatric hospital services that were born in Esplugues. Conditions such as poliomyelitis and tuberculosis were treated, and orthopedic solutions were also provided to children. "And both the management and the Brothers always had a vision for the future that has led us to adapt to the needs of the population."
"The public agreement was a great leap and, about ten years ago, the hospital opened its international branch, thinking of needy children from developing countries. Apart from that, from many countries, families who can choose to have their children treated at very advanced centers in Israel or the United States, choose to come to Barcelona to do so. The international projection of our hospital today is very good, it is very well positioned," points out Josep Caritg.
To promote and drive innovative therapies, the hospital created the SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona, a unique assistance and research center in Europe"This is an unbeatable and globally recognized project. We have state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. We are proud to feel part of this family, but also very grateful to the people who have always helped to move forward. Even today, large donors make many of our projects possible", he adds. Many of these projects go beyond medical assistance, such as accompanying some treatments with dogs or clowns, music therapy, and art therapy, the celebration of the most important holidays of the year, and a spirit that has always endured over time and is a hallmark of the Hospital de Sant Joan de Déu: support not only for the patient but also for their entire immediate family context.
It was already the spirit of that first charity hospital, created without profit, that took sick children for walks in the surrounding gardens, as part of their healing, and which today has managed to position it as a world leader in the advancement of diagnoses, treatments, and research, without losing the mission of attending to the 360 degrees of every child who arrives.
According to the 1973 report, the Hospital already had 543 professionals on staff, attended 3,784 annual emergencies, 17,323 outpatients, and 5,468 inpatients. A few years later, in the 80s, the concerted Catalan health system was born, and the hospital became part of it. In 1992, it became a university hospital by signing an agreement with the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) that recognized and consolidated its teaching tradition. That same year, it also reached an agreement with the Departament de Sanitat and the Hospital Clínic to incorporate the pediatric and pediatric surgery services of this center into a new unit physically located at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu. And on November 29 of the following year, the Integrated Unit of Pediatrics and Pediatric Surgery of the Hospital Clínic-Hospital Sant Joan de Déu was launched.
Unusual successes
The Hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Barcelona is the center that currently treats the most cases of childhood cancer in Spain —and one of the first in Europe. It successfully treated the first pediatric patient with the innovative CAR-T 19 immunotherapy under the coverage of the National Health System in Spain. It was a six-year-old boy from Alicante affected by acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who was referred to the Oncology Area of the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu after having suffered two relapses of the disease and having undergone a transplant of his hematopoietic progenitors, from bone marrow. After being treated at Sant Joan de Déu, the child returned to his city and was able to resume his usual activity. CAR-T 19 is a therapy that enables the patient's own immune system to recognize, attack, and destroy cancer cells in a targeted way.
To promote and drive innovative therapies such as CAR-T 19, which offer hope for children with cancer who currently have no cure options, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu created the SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona, a unique assistance and translational research center in Europe.
Currently, the hospital treats more than 800 international patients from over 90 countries suffering from complex diseasesAs a result of the work carried out in recent years, researchers are treating children suffering from very aggressive retinal cancers or retinoblastomas with an experimental treatment that seeks a cure while avoiding the loss of the eye. They are also exploring other immunotherapy treatments for a specific type of incurable brain tumor and carry out studies that allow predicting the aggressiveness of other tumors such as neuroblastoma (the most frequent extra-cranial solid tumor in children) or Ewing's sarcoma (bone tumor). This information can be key to prescribing the ideal treatment in each case.
Researchers from Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and the biotechnology company VCN Biosciences, from the Grifols company, achieved for the first time in the world that an oncolytic virus allowed a child to overcome retinal cancer. This happened with a child who traveled from Venezuela to receive the treatment with which he became free of the disease and maintains the visual acuity that allows him to walk and play normally.
The Hospital also leads a project to improve the survival of children with leukemia in Latin America, with the intention of equating it to that of European children. And it is one of the centers that treats the most children with rare diseases in Europe, with more than 28,000 active patients corresponding to more than 1,400 different pathologies.
In November 2020, the FDA approved naxitamab, a high-risk neuroblastoma immunotherapy treatment administered for the first time in the world on June 12, 2017, at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it for medical use in the treatment of refractory or relapsed high-risk neuroblastoma in bone marrow, thanks to the impactful results obtained and its duration in an incurable patient population. That is why now Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona is considered one of the best centers in the world for the treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma, which today continues to be a significant challenge worldwide.
Always humanizing care
Humanization has always been a very present value in all actions and initiatives undertaken by the hospital throughout its history. As a center of the Hospital Order of Sant Joan de Déu, one of its main values is hospitality and, one of its objectives, to care for its patients in a comprehensive manner: treating the disease they have, but also accompanying them in the process, supporting them and trying to reduce the impact of hospitalization.
How to be more comfortable to accompany the illness has been an objective of its professionals in parallel with the improvement of clinical practice and the advancement in health researchTo do this, the center began to implement a care model focused on the family, so that the child could be accompanied at all times by their parents, and they could even participate in some of the procedures their child receives. This model was planned to be included in the new facilities, with spaces specially designed for families to rest and playrooms for children. This has always been a constant at the Hospital de Sant Joan de Déu, until today. How to be more comfortable to accompany illness has been an objective of its professionals in parallel to the improvement of clinical practice and the advancement in health research throughout its history.
Currently, the Hospital treats more than 800 international patients from more than 90 countries who suffer from complex diseases. In the case of oncology patients, the success rate of treatments depends on the type of ailment of each child, whether they have received any prior treatment, and the possibility of prescribing improved or innovative treatments, such as naxitamab.
The Hospitaller Order of Sant Joan de Déu is present in 52 countries with 405 centers and social, health, educational, and research foundations, which provide more than 35 million services annually. This work is possible thanks to the involvement of 1,012 Brothers, 65,000 professionals, and 23,500 volunteers.