SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital is a university, maternity, and paediatric hospital dedicated exclusively to caring for pregnant women, children, and teenagers under the age of 18. With an over 150-year history, we are one of Europe’s busiest children hospitals.
Every year, our professionals care for 350,000 patients from around the world.
Our team consists of more than 3,400 specialized paediatric professionals, trained at internationally renowned facilities around the globe. Our main specialities are paediatric surgery, foetal surgery, cardiology, rare and complex diseases, neurology and neurosurgery, oncology and orthopaedics and traumatology.
At the SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital we have treated more than 28,500 patients with complex diseases, and although we treat patients with diseases that are 17% more complex compared with Spanish institutional published standards, our mortality and readmission rates are lower. In oncology, for example:
- 90% of patients with a low-grade brain glioma and 84% of patients with a Ewing’s sarcoma overcome the disease after 10 years.
- 94% of our patients with lymphoblastic leukaemia survive after five years.
- 90% of patients with a high-risk neuroblastoma treated at our centre are disease-free after three years, without relapse after the first full remission.
Our specialised SJD Pediatric Cancer Centre treats over 400 children and teenagers with cancer every year. It is a monographic paediatric cancer centre, unique in Spain, and one of the largest in Europe and worldwide.
We have a high capability to develop advanced therapies in childhood oncol- ogy, which are available in very few centres worldwide, as for example:
- CART-19 immunotherapy involves modifying the patient’s own lymphocytes to destroy cancer cells
- We were the first hospital in the world (with the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York) to offer anti-G2 immunotherapy with naxitamab to treat refractory high-risk neuroblastomas.
- Oncolytic viruses genetically modified to destroy the eye tumour
We are one of the leading centres in Europe for scientific research into paediatric diseases. We have over 600 researchers who work tirelessly to continue building knowledge about the diseases that impact children and pregnant women. We have the highest number of paediatric clinical trials in Spain and boast a tissue and tumour bank. We have over 300 active clinical trials, in over 20 different areas of therapeutic paediatrics, and almost 70% of them concern complex paediatric diseases.
A hospital centred on paediatric patients and their families
At the SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital, we work hard to reduce the impact of hospitalisation on our patients. That is why the design and comfort of our facilities is so important, as a pleasant environment can help reduce anxiety in children receiving treatment. Our aim is no pain. We know that distraction is a very powerful tool in reducing the perception of pain during routine care. That is why we have dogs, music, art and clown performers involved in our therapies – even canine-assisted operations!
