The Professional Excellence Awards 2022, presented each year by the Medical Association of Barcelona, were given out last night at the AXA Auditorium in Barcelona. The winners included three professionals from the Hospital Clínic: Dr. Joan Ramon Badia in the category of Hospital Care Medicine, Dr. Josep Dalmau in Biomedical Research, and Dr. Álvaro Urbano-Ispizua in Medical Education. Moreover, in the category that honours Healthcare Teams, the work carried out by the Hospital Clínic’s Commission on Domestic and Gender-based Violence, chaired by Dr. Lluïsa Garcia Esteve, was recognized.
Dr. Joan Ramon Badia Jobal is a specialist in pulmonology and is currently the Director of the Hospital Clínic Institute of Respiratory Diseases. He is also a researcher in the IDIBAPS group Inflammation and repair in respiratory diseases.For almost 20 years, he was a member of staff at the Respiratory Intensive Care Unit, a unit he coordinated until 2021. Over the course of his career, he has specialized in pulmonology and intensive care, and he has been a professor and speaker in over 40 courses and master’s degrees. He is also the director of over ten courses and was the organizer of the last Catalan pulmonology day. He is an associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, has authored over 50 publications in indexed journals and is a collaborating or principal investigator in several projects with competitive funding.
Dr. Josep Dalmau Obrador is a specialist in neurology, neuroimmunology, neuro-oncology, paraneoplastic syndromes and autoimmune encephalitis. Over the course of his career, he has discovered 10 autoimmune diseases, including anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. He is the principal investigator in the IDIBAPS Pathogenesis of Autoimmune Neuronal Diseases research group and also an ICREA researcher. His most outstanding projects include "Multi-scale exploration of autoantibodies against synaptic receptors" and "Anti-NMDAR encephalitis: Antibody subclasses, and the study of the effects of the chronic presence of antibodies in the brain of adult mice, foetal brain development, and synaptogenesis”. In the field of teaching, he is an associate professor of Medicine at the University of Barcelona and professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2015, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Medicine. He is an editor of the journal of the American Academy of Neurology (Neurology, Neuroimmunology and Neuroinflammation). He has authored over 250 scientific publications, written a book on autoimmune encephalitis (with his colleague Dr. Francesc Graus), and participated in more than 60 book chapters and over 350 international conferences.
Dr. Álvaro Urbano-Ispizua is a haematologist specializing in stem cell transplantation, cellular immunotherapy and haemato-oncology. He is currently the Director of the Hospital Clínic Institute of Haematological and Oncological Diseases, a task he combines with teaching as a professor of Medicine at the University of Barcelona. One of his greatest professional satisfactions is having been chosen as the “guest of honour” (padrí) of several graduating classes of medical students at the University of Barcelona. In research, he leads the IDIBAPS “Haematopoietic progenitor cell transplantation” research group. He is also the author and co-author of over 180 articles, which have been published in international journals such as The Lancet, the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Haematologica.
Finally, in the category that honours Healthcare Teams, the work carried out by Hospital Clínic’s Commission on Domestic and Gender-based Violence was rewarded. It was founded in 1998 on the initiative of a group of professionals from the Hospital Clínic Accident & Emergency Department, who dealt with the problem of gender-based violence in their daily work. From this point on, a line of work was adopted in order to improve the coordination of the care provided to victims of abuse, and to raise awareness among the rest of the organization. This line of work is the origin of the current Commission on Domestic and Gender-based Violence, which was established in 2000. The Commission works to provide care to all kinds of people who are subjected to violence. Dr. Lluïsa Garcia Esteve, psychiatrist, one of the driving forces behind the commission and its current chairperson, accepted the award on behalf of the whole team.
