This year, 2024, is an anniversary year for us: Clínica Girona is 90 years old.
On 15 March 1934, Dr Francesc Coll i Turbau founded Clínica Girona together with a group of doctors from Girona and his wife, Manolita Carreras, who took the reins of the clinic after her husband's death in 1936. This year, the clinic celebrates its 90th anniversary at its new premises, at Carrer de Barcelona 206 in Girona, after a long history of uninterrupted healthcare provision at Carrer Joan Margall 26 in Girona.
Clínica Girona was the first clinic in the city of Girona. This was in the 1930s, an era when the Provincial Hospital of Santa Caterina was the only healthcare facility and the city's sanitary situation was dire. Some of the major epidemics from the late 19th century still lingered: tuberculosis, syphilis, and typhoid fever (popularly known as “typhus”). Most homes in the city did not have bathrooms and at most had a small privy. It was a very different time from the present: doctors used to visit patients at home, and when they needed to perform surgery, they did so in the treatment rooms of their private practices.
The opening of Clínica Girona, by Doctor Coll, on 15th March 1934, made a significant impact on the city. It was a white, polished building, “with bathrooms in the rooms!”, which generated great interest and admiration among the citizens. “How modern!”, was the most common comment of the time, according to the chroniclers.
We'll just point out one detail: Dr. Francesc Coll i Turbau died on 14th March 1936, at the age of forty-nine, a victim of a viral pneumonia that he contracted from patients with typhus, whom he visited, fully aware, as a doctor, of the risks that such care entailed. The founder of Clínica Girona, Dr. Coll practised medicine for twenty-five years and continued to do so until the last days of his life.
The Girona Clinic was in the same location for 88 years. In 1934 it occupied a small villa on waste ground “outside the city walls”, on a street, not yet urbanised, which was then known by the name of Pare Claret and which later came to be called Joan Maragall.
The First Girona Clinic
The first Clínica Girona was designed by the architect Rafel Masó, a personal friend of Dr. Coll. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 represented the first major setback for the institution, as it was also for Catalan society. Everything came to a standstill, and during the war years and then the immediate post-war period, people were only thinking about survival. As Dr. Coll died in the same year, 1936, it was his widow, Mrs. Manolita Carreras, who took the reins of the Clinic and pushed it forward together with the other doctor shareholders. After the initial years of crisis and extreme hardship in daily life, the number of beds was expanded in the 1940s to collaborate with the recently created Compulsory Sickness Insurance (SOE), a collaboration that lasted until 1956 when the Álvarez de Castro Health Residence (now Doctor Josep Trueta University Hospital) became operational.
Then would come years of expansion, of works, of many works, and of modernisation and adaptation to new times and new techniques. The incorporation of new highly qualified professionals and new technologies has been the constant of recent decades. Clínica Girona has been opening new services, year after year, based on the demands observed among the population of Girona, a population in an increasingly globalised world.
After the Civil War, Clínica Girona expanded its bed capacity to collaborate with the recently created Seguro Obligatorio de Enfermedad (SOE), a collaboration that lasted until 1956 with the construction of the Residència Sanitària Álvarez de Castro, which is now the Hospital Josep Trueta.
In 1974, the clinic opened the first Dialysis centre in the Girona region, and over the decades it continued to renew collaboration agreements with public healthcare, which were officially made permanent with the centre's affiliation to the XHUP, from the very moment this Public Health Network was created in the summer of 1985.
In the 1980s, Clínica Girona remodelled and expanded its surgical area, increasing its number of operating theatres to 7, and the Intensive Care Unit was brought into service. In the early 1990s, a scanner (CT) was installed, representing a significant technological advance in diagnostic imaging. In 1997, Clínica Girona opened the first Magnetic Resonance service in the Girona region, and in 2001, it pioneered the region's first Nuclear Medicine service.
During the first 20 years of the 21st century, Clínica Girona has become the largest private clinic in Girona, with the highest volume of activity. It boasts a complex of buildings, occupying an approximate area of 12,000 square metres, interconnected and fronting Joan Maragall, Bisbe Lorenzana, and Juli Garreta streets. The clinic employs over 400 staff, has 114 inpatient beds, 7 operating theatres, and a delivery room, all equipped with the most modern technology.
Betting on new technologies
In recent years, Clínica Girona has implemented highly specialised services such as: Pathological Anatomy, Prenatal Diagnosis, Human Reproduction (In Vitro Fertilisation), the study of Sleep Disorders (Polysomnography), etc., and has enhanced the centre's healthcare activities with new forms of Laparoscopic Surgery, also increasing Day Case Surgery. This has all been made possible thanks to the support provided to the centre by its permanent in-house services, such as the ICU, the A&E department, Radiology, and the Clinical Analysis Laboratory. Years ago, it also implemented a new quality model (based on the European EFQM model).
The Clinic became too small on Joan Maragall street, it couldn't grow, and the project to build a new Clinic was started. Initially, it was planned for land in Fornells de la Selva, but after many bureaucratic hurdles and a meeting with President Carles Puigdemont, who was then the mayor of the city, the location of the new Clinic was confirmed at the southern entrance of Girona, in an area that was very run-down and which the construction of the new Clinic has helped to dignify.
The construction works, lasting three and a half years, were carried out by a temporary business union (UTE) led by Construccions Rubau, along with Alfred, from an architectural project by PMMT Architects, specialising in hospitals. Site management and quality, safety and health control were carried out by the technical architecture firm. AT2.
The new Girona Clinic
On Monday 18 April 2022, a public holiday during Easter, the Clinic on Carrer Joan Maragall closed its doors at precisely 8 am, and the patients then admitted were transferred to the new clinic, located at Carrer de Barcelona 206. The operation lasted a few hours, and from precisely 8 am on 18 April, the new Clínica Girona was fully operational.
The new building housing the Clinic triples the space of the old premises on Joan Maragall street: it increases from a surface area of approximately 13,000 m² to 41,000 m². It expands all the services that were previously available, becoming a leading clinic in Catalonia, and the most modern hospital centre to incorporate total accessibility, which allows all individuals to be treated equally, from their arrival at the centre, during their stay, and upon their departure, regardless of their motor or sensory capabilities.
Clínica Girona, which has a staff of over 600 people, is currently a medical centre adapted to the present and the future. Since the opening of the new Clínica Girona at C/ Barcelona 206, there has been a significant increase in activity, thanks to the new facilities boasting the most modern medical technology, more operating theatres and more services. The new clinic is a modern healthcare centre, currently the most modern in the Girona region, well-connected and functional, enabling the Clínica Girona Group to face the 21st century and continue to fulfil, under the best possible conditions, the commitment to health it made to the people of Girona 90 years ago.
