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There are few professions more beautiful than improving the well-being and lives of patients. If not, ask the person in charge of the Heart Failure Unit at the Miguel Servet Hospital in Zaragoza, Marisa Sanz. The service he leads received last year, from the Spanish Society of Cardiology, the quality seal that certifies that it meets all the requirements in the care of cardiovascular diseases and offers all the new advances to treat the sick.
Faced with the problem of having to transfer those suffering from heart failure from this community to others, this professional, along with the entire surgical service team, began to move so that "they could have their own transplant," says Sanz. Thus, the journey of this new hospital management model began, which consists of three phases: audit, with a visit to the facilities and interviews with members of the unit; and issuance of a final report. «They reward daily work to improve the health of patients who repeat and repeat admissions. You can call us whenever you want or come to the unit. We have thus managed to reduce this number and make the doctor-patient relationship much closer. We do not improve prognosis, but we do improve quality of life,” Sanz humbly expresses.
PIONEER
Since 1999, this doctor with a big heart has been dedicated to heart transplantation and heart failure, a disease that she recognizes "you don't know until you're close to it, but it is very widespread." After experiencing the first phase of transplants at the Doce de Octubre hospital in Madrid, she became an outstanding figure within the cardiological service of Servet. It was she, along with the entire Cardiac Surgery Group of the Zaragoza sanatorium, who successfully performed the first heart transplant in Aragon on March 30, 2000, a date engraved in her memory.
Beyond her professional experience, Sanz is a faithful defender of research, a field that she regrets does not have the importance it deserves in our country: «On a health level our society is good, but in Spain there is no research. "They buy research from abroad, while there are very good researchers here," says she, who is also an associate medical professor at the University of Zaragoza.
Now, that effort can be rewarded in the Aragonese of the Year, a candidacy that he admits “has taken me by surprise. It seems exceptional to me. "It is a recognition of the work of an entire team that I represent."
