Catalan hospitals launch project to treat rare neuromuscular diseases

Health institutions in Catalonia have joined forces to create a multidisciplinary unit specialized in treating people affected by rare neuromuscular diseases. This innovative service is expected to reduce the number of medical visits required by putting together a team of doctors from different fields ready to offer a personalized service depending on the patients’ needs.

This project is backed by health centers based in Badalona, a neighboring city of Barcelona. The Hospital Germans Trias (popularly known as Can Ruti) and the Guttmann Institute (one of Europe’s top neuro-rehabilitation centres) intend to notably improve the efficiency as well as the effectiveness of the treatment with this new project.

“It’s a way to organize ourselves to find a response to the patient’s needs,” says Montserrat Bernabeu, the Guttmann Institute’s medical director. “People with rare diseases are complex patients, patients with multiple needs and problems at various levels, and therefore we need a large number of specialists in order to respond to these problems. What we do is bring together all these specialists in a single space so all these problems can be solved with just one visit.”