Until now, the only Spanish centre with this accreditation is the Neurosurgery Service of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid.
This is a prestigious recognition awarded by the JRAAC (Joint Residency Advisory and Accreditation Committee), which is made up of members of the EANS and the UEMS to distinguish the clinical and training experience of neurosurgery departments throughout the continent.
As Dr José Luis Sanmillan, neurosurgeon at the HUB and resident tutor, points out, "the accreditation places us in the leading group of European hospitals, both in terms of training in the key areas of neurosurgery (at resident and post-resident level), and in terms of surgical, care and research activity. All these aspects have been audited by the committee's professionals".
The European accreditation was obtained after a thorough and exhaustive audit by the committee, which for more than a year gathered information from the HUB’s Neurosurgery Service through reports, questionnaires and objective data of all kinds. These allowed assessing: the resident training (training plans, teaching methodology, organisation), the Service’s and the hospital’s resources (materials and personnel), and the care activity (workload and surgical volume, clinical guidelines, research activity, etc.).
The Neurosurgery Service at Bellvitge Hospital performs more than 1,300 major high-complexity surgeries every year. These include awake-patient surgery and surgery in brain areas of high eloquence; skull base surgery with minimally invasive and endoscopic approaches; neurovascular surgery with a comprehensive hybrid approach; epilepsy and Parkinson's surgery; movement disorders; psychosurgery; oncological neurosurgery with intraoperative radiotherapy and complex spinal surgery. It has three high-tech operating theatres, equipped with two intraoperative CT scanners and an intraoperative angiograph.
In terms of research activity, the service participates in numerous currently active international clinical trials. It is also leading its own research projects and publishing the results in leading international journals in neurosurgery and neuroscience. Finally, it should be noted that the Neurosurgery Service at the HUB organises international courses for the training of both residents of this Service and other neurosurgery residents in Spain and Europe.