Sant Juan de Déu – Barcelona Children’s Hospital

Healthcare provider: Hospital Sant Joan de Déu is a healthcare provider included in the National Health System of Spain. It is considered a National Reference Centre which devotes its activities to the attention of rare cardiac diseases that fulfil one or more of the characteristics set out in the Royal Decree 1302/2006. The centre is also dedicated to perform techniques, technology or procedures of care of certain pathologies or groups of pathologies which fulfil one or more of the characteristics set out in Royal Decree 1302/2006. As a Reference centre of the National Health System (known as CSUR) the centre has the following features:

• It covers the entire national territory and provides care for all patients on equal terms regardless of their place of residence.
• It provides multidisciplinary team care: health care, support for diagnostic confirmation, defined therapeutic strategies and monitoring and it acts as a consultant for clinical units that usually treat those patients.
• It ensures continuity of care between patients’ stages of life (foetus-child-adult) and between several levels of care.
• It evaluates results.
• It provides training to other professionals.

Hospital Sant Joan de Déu holds National Accreditation as a Service Reference (CSUR) for comprehensive care of new-borns with congenital heart disease and children with complex congenital heart disease. It also holds National Accreditation as a Service Reference (CSUR) in arrhythmology and Paediatric electrophysiology.

Centre for rare and complex heart diseases: The area of expertise and healthcare of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu within the rare cardiac diseases in children focuses on addressing paediatric arrhythmias, channelopathies and inherited cardiomyopathies with a prevalence lower than 1/2000. These assessments are carried out by three main units: Paediatric Arrhythmias and Sudden Death and Inherited Cardiovascular Diseases. The centre offers clinical diagnosis, high-tech imaging, biochemical assessment, histological evaluation, hemodynamic assessment and electrophysiological studies, cardiac ablation and cardiac device implantation for all these patients. All the previous units receive direct support from the anaesthesia service, the paediatric and neonatal intensive care unit and the advanced foetal medicine service. Medical professionals at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu actively participate in groups of experts of rare cardiac diseases and have coordinated some of the European Guidelines referring to these diseases.

Prof. Georgia Sarquella-Brugada is a paediatric cardiologist, cardiac electrophysiologist and the representative member of San Juan de Déu – Barcelona Children’s Hospital in ERN GUARD-HEART. She is leading the Thematic Area “Special electrophysiology conditions in children” of ERN GUARD-HEART.