Sanitas and Pryconsa lay the first stone of the new Valdebebas Hospital, due to open in 2025

The works are being promoted by Saint Croix HI, the Socimi of the Pryconsa Group, owner of the building, in its commitment to the diversification of asset types.
Iñaki Peralta, CEO of Sanitas and Bupa Europe & Latin America, and Marco Colomer, Chairman and CEO of Pryconsa, have laid the first stone of the new Sanitas Valdebebas Hospital, which will open its doors in 2025. It will be the company’s fifth hospital in Spain and will also be the headquarters of the digital hospital.

This new facility will have more than 30,000 square metres that will house the broadest portfolio of services to address any health need of patients, including the most complex pathologies.

“The new Sanitas Valdebebas Hospital is the sum of our aim to care for people, and to do it better every day, and of what we have learned by leading digitalisation in healthcare. Today we are laying the foundations for a new model of digital and personalised care for all our patients,” explained Iñaki Peralta, CEO of Sanitas and Bupa Europe & Latinamerica.

“With this Hospital we continue with the development of projects in the city of Madrid, combining our efforts with Sanitas to provide the city with a new state-of-the-art hospital centre,” said Marco Colomer, President and CEO of Pryconsa and Saint Croix HI.

The centre will have 98 single rooms, 23 dedicated to the Mental Health unit, 46 consulting rooms, 8 state-of-the-art operating theatres (including the Robotic Surgery Programme and Interventional Radiology), 15 ICU beds (9 adult and 6 paediatric), 16 Emergency boxes (plus 2 triage rooms and 2 observation rooms) and a Sanitas Dental Centre, as well as an advanced technological arsenal: SPECT-CT, PET-CT, CT, MRI and digital mammography and ultrasound equipment, among others.

The hospital will also be home to the company’s Phase 1 Clinical Trials and Training units for healthcare professionals. In addition, the centre will have three differential services:

• Instituto de Oncología Avanzada, which offers in a single centre all the services necessary to care for a person with cancer: high-precision genetic and molecular diagnosis and counselling, state-of-the-art medical oncology and radiotherapy treatments, and close care and monitoring of each patient. The IOA’s new headquarters in Madrid will also have the most advanced linear accelerators for the radiotherapy treatment of people with cancer who need it. In addition to this environment, the IOA will actively listen to patients’ needs to provide the care and friendly environment they need to cope with their illness.
• Mental Health Institute, to treat patients with psychological and psychiatric needs in a comprehensive and personalised way. This level of specialisation in a general hospital responds to the increase in the prevalence of mental health problems in the population and guarantees a medical response for any patient, as it will also have its own hospitalisation wing with 23 individual rooms.
• Advanced Rehabilitation Centre, which will offer a monographic health space for physiotherapy and rehabilitation treatments, with digital tools and the most advanced treatment technologies. Its location in the new hospital will allow a real and direct integration with the rest of the centre’s medical and surgical specialities.

New care model

Sanitas’ new care model aims to provide patients with the same excellent care as always, while providing support in all situations of their lives thanks to digital care. Physical care will continue to play a key role in caring for people who come to the hospital, but digitalisation makes it possible to create a new space for prevention that allows them to remain healthy for longer or to recover their health in their own environment and without interrupting their normal life.

And in this new area of care, the ambition is the highest. The new Sanitas Valdebebas Hospital is looking to remote monitoring and the power of AI and Big Data to help healthcare professionals make better decisions. But it also looks to genomics and the absolute personalisation of diagnoses and treatments. The goal is to provide medicine that offers individualised solutions, with the utmost rigour and clinical excellence and providing people with a unique care experience, as in the case of the home chemotherapy delivery programme.

A centre that will take care of people’s health and that of the environment

The new Sanitas hospital will be sustainable, low-emission and will consume 100% renewable electricity in order to care for the health of the environment, which is directly linked to people’s health. According to the company’s commitment to sustainability, which by 2030 will be free of direct emissions and by 2040 of indirect emissions, the new centre is designed to also care for the health of the world in which we live.

Sanitas hospitals have a solid track record in sustainability: in the last 10 years they have reduced their carbon footprint by almost 1,000 tonnes of CO2. The new hospital will continue on this path and will have energy saving and rational energy management systems and renewable energy consumption programmes that are already in place in other company facilities.

The construction itself will be approached with sustainability criteria to ensure that the impact of the works is the least impact on the environment, both during construction and during the rest of the hospital’s life. In addition, all actions related to the decarbonisation and ecosystem services of the new hospital are being planned.

The centre will have 335 parking spaces and 34 electric charging points for vehicles, as well as parking for bicycles in order to promote sustainable mobility.

Humanisation of medicine

Sanitas will apply the same model of humanised care that it offers in its centres, but with the advantage of being able to incorporate these principles from the construction stage. This new facility is born as a friendly health environment and absolutely focused on the needs of the people who will inhabit it: patients, relatives and professionals. It is the same space management model that Sanitas has already implemented in new medical centres, as well as in the Ana de Austria consultation building, adjacent to the Sanitas La Moraleja University Hospital, and aims to make patients feel more comfortable and better cared for.

According to Sanitas’ experience, the use of natural light, materials, acoustics and signage transform the patient’s experience when visiting a service. Programmes will be implemented to manage light and noise pollution, as well as criteria for universal accessibility without physical barriers, design of spaces that guarantee people’s privacy and care for patients with specific needs (dementia, autism).

Everything in the new building will optimise the patient experience, including safeguarding their privacy, even in communal areas. And the Sanitas medical consultation model will be implemented in which the healthcare professional and the patient share the same side of the table, without physical barriers, so that people can actively participate in the process and in decision-making.