Two years ago, Dr. Alberto Breda (Verona, 1973) successfully performed a transcontinental robotic surgery between Bordeaux and Beijing. The president of the Robotic Surgery Unit (ERUS) of the European Association of Urology remotely removed a kidney tumor from over 8,000 kilometers away, a medical milestone that laid the groundwork for Europe's first robotic telesurgery program, which is just getting started. This system connects the Puigvert Foundation in Barcelona and the San Roque Hospital in Las Palmas, 3,000 kilometers apart, allowing surgeons to operate on patients from the Canary Islands from the Catalan capital.

By the time he was nine, Darío had already visited several clinics throughout Valencia to treat the involuntary muscle contractions that limited his movement and almost prevented him from walking. This condition was worsening, and the professionals couldn't determine the appropriate treatment. Furthermore, the medications they prescribed caused side effects such as severe pain and even blindness. But in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Darío's family received a call: "It changed our lives," admits Jaime López, the boy's father. The caller was Dr. Belén Pérez, head of pediatric neurology at Vall d'Hebron Hospital, who offered them the opportunity to come to Barcelona to begin treatment. The neurologist determined that Darío suffered from dystonia, a condition that, along with Parkinson's disease and essential tremor, is characterized by a movement disorder. It is common for patients with this condition to visit the Neurology and Pediatric Neurology departments of the Germans Trias i Pujol and Vall d'Hebron hospitals. In fact, the Ministry of Health has designated them as the reference centers (CSUR) in Catalonia for the surgical treatment of patients with movement disorders, whether adult or pediatric.

The Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, baptized as Doctor Death in a documentary, entered in a Catalan prison in September 2024. The famous doctor was sentenced by a Swedish court to two and a half years in prison for serious assault on three patients between 2011 and 2014, to whom he transplanted a plastic trachea bathed in stem cells. As Macchiarini has lived in Catalonia since landing at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona in 2004, in a luxurious villa in Cabrils, he requested to serve his sentence in a Catalan penitentiary, a request that was accepted by the National Court. Finally, after all possible appeals and once the sentence was final, Macchiarini entered the Quatre Camins prison.

Anna Gual's son was four years old when he had to be operated on for carnots and tonsils at the Hospital Universitari de Terrassa. It was November 3, 2023. Gual entered the operating room lobby with the little boy in her arms. There, they both witnessed the sedation – intranasally – of a crying girl and then she was taken inside. One, two, three, four, five minutes. It was her turn. Pre-anesthesia medication is administered with the aim of reducing the anxiety of patients in pediatric operations. Unfortunately, and unlike that girl, the sedation did not have the desired effect on Gual's son: "He was so nervous that he kept crying." Two nurses then took him away: "They had to tear me from my arms to take him to the operating room; it was traumatic," she laments.

In Catalonia there are many doctors who combine their work in the public and private health systems. The former combines knowledge, academia and patients with greater complexity, but salaries are lower than in private clinics. This means that many workers, when they finish their work day in the public sector, choose to work in private medicine to get an extra salary, especially in the specialties of dermatology, ophthalmology, surgery, cardiology and otorhinolaryngology. They are professionals who, they say, would earn a much better living if they had chosen only the private branch, but who have chosen the public system by vocation and complement it with two or three afternoons in a private clinic.