The multinational Alcon, specialized in visual health products, has installed in Cornellà (Barcelona) a training and practical eye surgery center using state-of-the-art technologies that will serve all of Europe. The Alcon Experience Center (AEC) is aimed at ophthalmology and optometry professionals, with the forecast of serving 2,000 international experts per year. The facilities are also open for the training of nurses, students, members of scientific societies, and personnel of this company.
The Alcon Experience Center, located in the World Trade Center Almeda Park, in a building adjacent to the group's corporate headquarters in Spain, has an area of 1,700 square meters and will contribute to the development of the next generation of ophthalmologists and optometrists, offering them two experimental operating rooms for cataract, retina, and refractive surgery ---Wetlab and Drylab, respectively---. These facilities allow the simulation of operations under the same conditions as if dealing with a patient, in addition to having access to the most advanced diagnostic equipment for visualization to detect pathologies, as explained by Eduard Moreno, director of the center.
"The experience carried out in our operating rooms allows the professional to operate on an artificial eye under the same conditions as they would if they had an admitted patient and gain confidence, while also foreseeing and resolving possible errors, to successfully develop their real interventions," adds Moreno, who explains that each operating room has ten stations installed with capacity for two professionals.
For his part, Paulo Pinto, director of Alcon's surgical franchise in Spain and Portugal, highlighted that "the company's commitment responds to its interest in improving people's health care and providing the best quality of life to ophthalmic patients."
The center has two experimental operating rooms for cataract, retina, and refractive surgeryThe company's manager, who did not provide the investment made to develop the center, explained thatAlcon has the Alcon Experience Academy network, with 80 training facilities for the training of professionals spread throughout the world, some of them in Europe to serve the different therapeutic areas. According to Pinto, the Cornellà center concentrates the training of the various areas in a single facility, in which a virtual reality station, an auditorium and a museumrepresentative of Alcon's ophthalmic history.
Currently, the Alcon group does not have any factories in Catalonia, after a spin-off process carried out by Novartis in 2019 ---eight years after having acquired it--- through the segregation of the company and its IPO, trading on the Zurich and New York markets. The company, which does not provide data by subsidiaries, has a global workforce of 23,000 employees and in 2020 was impacted by the pandemic crisis in its revenues, with an 8% drop to 5.7 billion euros.