Originally published on LinkedIn on 10 March 2026.

A few weeks ago, I visited Sant Joan de Déu hospital in Barcelona. I knew of its reputation, but I left genuinely moved.

The control room reminded me of the bridge of the spaceship Enterprise: wall-to-wall displays, real-time monitoring, data flows and the full infrastructure of modern medicine concentrated in one space. But when you ask the staff what they are actually focused on, the answer is not clinical metrics. It is comfort, relief and whether a suffering child feels safe.

They will deploy the most advanced diagnostic technology available, and they will also deploy a therapy dog. Both are medical decisions. Neither is considered less serious than the other.

I was most impressed by how people talked about their work. Not about cases or pathologies, but about children, their families, their fears and their lives outside the hospital. The disease is something they are treating. The child is someone they are caring for.

That distinction requires sustained institutional commitment. It does not happen by accident. It reminded me, again, that personalised medicine is about the person more than the disease, and far more than any technology.

I have been thinking about this visit because, at the same time, I have been navigating Portugal’s largest hospital system with an elderly family member. The contrast is brutal. What I saw respected in those Barcelona wards, the vulnerability of a person in pain, their dignity and their need to be seen as more than their diagnosis, was simply absent.

The elderly in Portugal do not command the same moral urgency. They can be left to wait, to suffer and to feel invisible in a system that has already decided they no longer matter. Not through malice, I want to believe, but through indifference, which is far worse.

I believe that vulnerability deserves respect regardless of age.

Sant Joan de Déu takes its name from João de Deus, João Duarte Cidade, a Portuguese man born in 1495 who became a soldier, then a healer, and eventually founded a hospital in Granada dedicated to the poor and suffering. His message found a home in Barcelona, where it has been practised for more than 150 years.

Long live the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God. You have my utmost respect and admiration.