The Vall d'Hebron Children's Hospital opens a Therapeutic Area for Child and Adolescent Rehabilitation thanks to The Ricky Rubio Foundation and the ”la Caixa” Foundation
“Mom, this is a cool gym, look!” It is difficult to translate into words the emotion with which Martina explained to her mother the sensations she had the first day she entered the new Therapeutic Area of Child and Adolescent Rehabilitation of the Vall d'Hebron Children's Hospital, promoted by The Ricky Rubio Foundation and the "la Caixa" Foundation. Martina (9 years old) is one of the regular pediatric rehabilitation patients at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital. On Wednesdays at 5:00 p.m., he has an appointment with his physiotherapist, Gloria. Until now, children and adolescents like Martina had to travel to the Traumatology, Rehabilitation and Burns Hospital to get to the gym, and if they were hospitalized, they did therapy in the same room. But this transfer has ended. Thanks to the support of The Ricky Rubio Foundation and the 'la Caixa' Foundation, the Children's Hospital has just launched its own 'gym' designed for boys, girls and adolescents. 'Gym', in quotes, because it is much more than that. The new Therapeutic Area of Child and Adolescent Rehabilitation is a reality that has allowed a leap in the quality of care for patients. “Beyond avoiding travel and facilitating recovery, the concentration of activity and resources in a large, accessible space designed for pediatric and adolescent patients helps to improve care,” highlights Dr. Albert Salazar, manager of the Hospital. Vall d'Hebron University. The new space allows the number of patients receiving rehabilitation treatment to increase by 37%. “We have gone from treating 540 patients a year to 750,” details Dr. Albert Salazar.
Vall d'Hebron, reference center in the State
“The new therapeutic rehabilitation area offers a welcoming and pleasant environment for both young people and children. With games and sports as motivating elements, this space encourages patients' enthusiasm for attending and places the Vall d'Hebron Children's Hospital at the same level as the great pediatric hospitals in the world," highlights Josep Heredia, coordinator of The Ricky Rubio. Foundation. Vall d'Hebron is, together with the La Paz Hospital in Madrid, a benchmark in the State in this area. Among others, it has CSUR (Center, Service and Referring Unit) accreditations in children's orthopedics; pediatric kidney, heart, lung and liver transplant, or neuromuscular and rare diseases. “One of our objectives is to accompany pediatric patients and their families and we could not close our eyes to this need. We are proud to have participated in a project that also plays with sport as therapy in the recovery of long hospitalizations, cancer patients, trauma, major surgeries and transplants,” explains Josep Heredia.
Joana Prats, director of the Area of Relations with Social Entities of the “la Caixa” Foundation, points out that “we want to contribute to improving the quality of life of the people who need it most, in this case pediatric patients.” “That is why we wanted to promote this new area, which will serve to humanize the hospital space and to enhance the rehabilitation of children and adolescents who are sick or in the process of recovery,” he adds.
The new device has allowed Dr. Judith Sánchez-Raya, head of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and her team to turn the service around. The Nobel Prize in Medicine Bernard Houssy encouraged us to imagine great things to move forward, and that is what they have done. “We have created group rehabilitation programs that we could not do before due to space. They already work for oncology patients, with scoliosis or pectus excavatum,” explains Dr. Judith Sánchez-Raya. “We also have telerehabilitation programs and continue with our project of offering holistic treatment. We do respiratory physiotherapy in the same Pediatric ICU and we continue during the patients' hospitalization, according to their needs, with motor physiotherapy, occupational therapy or speech therapy, and outpatient therapy,” explains Dr. Sánchez-Raya.
Athletics, basketball and surfing, sport as a driving force to recover
The new area has 220 square meters distributed between an open-plan multipurpose room for inpatients and outpatients; two rooms for individual treatments; two occupational therapy rooms and a second multipurpose room that can be opened and closed, according to needs, where respiratory physiotherapy will be performed. Its design plays with the idea of focusing recovery towards sports training as well as health and to connect the values of sport with the treatment process. In the multipurpose room there is an athletics track, at the end of which there is a mirror that gives the sensation of being on a circular track. The walls are reminiscent of a climbing wall. And to transport patients who need it, a blue crane in the shape of waves hangs from the ceiling, leading children and adolescents to imagine that they are surfing. There are elliptical bicycles, back protectors, weights, hydraulic stretchers and mats, among other elements, adapted to the needs of boys, girls and adolescents. And the trash can that was in the old gym to practice basketball shots has been replaced by a real basket that invites you to play.
More schedules to reconcile with school and families
The other big news is the hours: the service opens from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. The coordinator of Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy of Vall d'Hebron, Álex Ginés, does not hide his joy, because until now patients only had schedules in the morning. “We have created a new team of two physiotherapists, an occupational therapist, an administrative therapist and an afternoon TCAI,” he explains. “And we have opened a specific time slot from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. for hospitalized patients. Leaving the rooms to go to the gym generates positive emotions: they leave the floor to go to a place to recover,” reflects Álex Ginés.
The extension in afternoon hours is designed so that outpatients do not have to skip classes and families have more hours to facilitate work-life balance. Like the case of Martina. Continuing with the narrative thread that guides patients and their families through the interior of the Children's Hospital through the cultures of the world, the Therapeutic Area of Child and Adolescent Rehabilitation is on the ground floor, in the space dedicated to the civilizations of the Mediterranean. . “As the Greeks did, we have turned rehabilitation and exercise into a game, thanks to a more accessible, friendly and appropriate space for children and adolescents,” concludes Consuelo Álvarez, attached to the Nursing Directorate.