The Clarós Foundation, founded and chaired by Pedro Clarós, full academician and vice-president of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), recalls in a special bulletin the mission it carried out last summer in Cape Verde to complete the mission that it was interrupted by the serious illness that Doctor Clarós contracted. The Foundation travelled to the African country taking advantage of the Easter holidays and already there, the academician suffered an acute pancreatitis that forced him to be repatriated in an ambulance aircraft and to stay five weeks hospitalised in Barcelona. Once recovered, Clarós himself encouraged his team to return and complete the mission.
Established more than two decades ago, the Clarós Foundation has already carried out more than a hundred missions in twenty countries in Africa, Asia and Europe, where it has carried out interventions on neck and face tumours, face reconstructions by traumatisms and tropical diseases and even amputations. A type of surgery to which the beneficiaries didn’t have access. At a rate of between six and seven a year, the Foundation has currently exceeded one hundred missions.
The Foundation adds to the work in situ a scholarship for doctors without specialized resources in the field of otorhinolaryngology, the specialty in which Clarós is a recognized international expert. These scholarships bring to Barcelona doctors from various developing countries who have learned the latest surgical techniques. “I believe that in all these years we have been able to do very important things, the most important thing is that we have been able to operate on a large number of patients without resources and who could hardly have been able to heal, and we have managed to change the lives of many people”, Clarós recalls in an interview published in the last issue of Tribuna Plural, the magazine of the RAED.
