It's 10:30 a.m. on a winter Friday, and when we arrive at 12-year-old Martín's room, we find him with his hospital teacher, Alba Sau. Together, they're trying to identify the fruit scent of each of the perfume bottles arranged on a tray. The young boy, who suffers from a rare metabolic disorder called sulfite oxidase deficiency, laughs every time he correctly identifies one of the fragrances, showing off his keen sense of smell. The day before, they had been painting, improvising a paintbrush with a straw and a pencil that Martín used in his mouth. "We try to adapt as much as possible to each child's tastes and interests to connect with them," Alba explains, while trying to set up Tobii, the tablet Martín uses to communicate through his eyes, on Martín's bedside table. "For me, it's essential that Martín can communicate, not only with me, but also with his mother and the healthcare staff; it's part of his recovery," she emphasizes.

After two weeks, the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, left Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona this Friday. His progress is positive, according to doctors, so he will continue his recovery at home. The medical team has not yet set a date for when he might return to work, as this will depend on his progress. However, at a press conference, both the hospital's managing director, Albert Salazar, and the head of infectious diseases, Dolors Rodríguez, explained that the illness he suffers from has an eight-week treatment protocol. He has already spent two weeks in the hospital. They were accompanied by the head of the home hospitalization service, Francesc Xavier Jiménez, who explained that a medical team from Vall d'Hebron will continue treating him at home. Salvador Illa left the hospital on his own two feet, using crutches, and went home by car. The president himself wrote a message to X a few hours later: "I'm already home, from where I must continue treatment at Vall d'Hebron Hospital for a few more days under medical supervision," he stated, before also thanking the hospital staff for their work: "Our public healthcare system is a source of pride."

A patient with a severe psychiatric disorder committed suicide on August 22 while waiting in an emergency room at the Terrassa University Hospital, sources from the Terrassa Health Consortium (CST) confirmed. The woman had been in the emergency room for two days waiting to be assigned a bed on the psychiatric ward, according to reports. The Newspaper and has been confirmed by the ARA. The CST, the consortium that manages this hospital of the Catalan Health Service (CatSalut), simply stated that the patient's death is "under analysis" by the Patient Quality and Safety Committee.

Anna Boltas, 17, experienced her father being told there wasn't enough blood available for more transfusions to keep him alive when he suffered from bladder cancer. "My sister and I offered to give him the necessary blood, but we were told that donations don't work that way," she explains. So, she decided to donate everything: platelets, blood, and plasma. In 2019, Carlos González had a headache. It didn't seem like anything that couldn't be cured with ibuprofen, but he began to feel a strange heartbeat, and in the emergency room, he discovered he had an arteriovenous malformation in his brain that needed surgery. During the 18-hour operation, 36 bags of donated blood were used. "My 14-year-old daughter doesn't tell me she wants to be of age to go out and party, but rather to donate blood," he boasts.

As a legacy of the pandemic, the Catalan health system has a multitude of contingency plans to respond to external phenomena quickly and flexibly. The latest example of an emergency situation shook the Iberian Peninsula on Monday. While the country held its breath for an unprecedented blackout that paralyzed everythingPrimary care centers (CAPs) and hospitals ensured that all urgent activity that could not be postponed could be handled normally. However, to ensure they had sufficient energy and to avoid travel at this most uncertain time, almost 5,000 medical tests and 500 operations were postponed, according to provisional data from the Department of Health. Sources consulted by ARA emphasize that all interventions without serious impacts on care are already being rescheduled.

After years of setbacks, the Tortosa City Council and the Generalitat have found a plan B to locate the University Hospital of Terres de l'Ebre in a new area with no risk of flooding and larger than initially planned. This Thursday, the Regional Minister for Territory, Housing, and Ecological Transition, Sílvia Paneque, signed a protocol with the Mayor of Tortosa, Jordi Jordan, by which the Generalitat (Catalan Government) commits to guaranteeing the urban planning procedures to facilitate access to the new hospital center that will be built in Raval de la Llet, in the Sant Llàtzer neighborhood.

After the pandemic, medical series seemed to have become immune, because reality had surpassed any fiction set in a hospital. However, after a reasonable amount of time, it's a television genre that remains relevant and with new sensibilities. After all, these types of series speak to us about life and death, about human vulnerability. Medical centers are spaces that reflect the vast majority of their social concerns.

Alicia Andrés He remembers the "tension" and "fear" that were experienced in the hospital. On March 12, 2020, she gave birth to her first child, Liam. A nurse entered the room in tears and told her and her partner that no one was to touch the baby and that they should hurry home. Alicia's parents had driven from Málaga, where they live, to meet their first grandchild. The next day, they were retracing their steps to return before the roads were closed. On March 14, 2020, a state of emergency was declared due to the COVID pandemic. Gemma was separated from her daughter She was only born because she tested positive for COVID. I could only pick her up to breastfeed her. According to the restrictive protocol that was then in place and later relaxed, babies had to be separated from COVID-positive mothers, skin-to-skin contact was not allowed, they were forced to maintain a distance of two meters between the bed and the crib, and the umbilical cord was cut early. Laura gave birth alone, was strapped down during the C-section, was not allowed to hold her daughter, and found no help with the difficult breastfeeding process.

The story of the new reference hospital in Terres de l'Ebre continues to accumulate chapters. In 2006, the Minister of Health, Marina Geli, announced the construction of a complex on the outskirts of Tortosa, a reference hospital for 180,000 people from Baix Ebre, Montsià, Terra Alta and Ribera d'Ebre. Three months later, the Generalitat stated this on an information board located on land in the Partial Plan of La Farinera, where the centre was planned. But almost twenty years later there is no hospital, nor land to build it. This Friday, the Generalitat has recognised that after delays and a thousand vicissitudes - economic crisis, budget cuts and a bureaucratic and technical labyrinth, old territorial and neighbourhood political grievances - the plots that the Tortosa City Council had acquired in the previous term to definitively house the new health complex are not valid due to their nature.

It was the night of December 31 when the medical director of the Hospital de Olot, Jaume Heredia, received an urgent call from those responsible for the center. They had detected that two professionals working in the covid unit had tested positive and that there were two non-covid patients with symptoms. "All the alarms went off: in six months we had had virtually no cases of transmission and, suddenly, two workers and two patients had been infected", Heredia recalls, who explains that they followed the protocol and made a screening throughout the hospital. The result: ten patients and three professionals infected, which increased the following days to seventeen patients and eleven workers.