Dr. Aliaga, a cardiologist who is responsible for implementing the cardiac rehabilitation programme in the Hospital General de Catalunya, spoke about the effectiveness of the treatment and backed up her claims using recent scientific publications. She also talked about other features of this practice, including time required and the creation of a multidisciplinary team.

Eloi Arias Labrador, the Coordinator of the Cardiac Rehabilitation Unit at the Institut d’Assistència Sanitària in Girona and the Coordinator of the CardioCerc centre, started his lecture with some data on cardiovascular diseases, which claim about three thousand lives in Catalonia alone.

He went on to describe his experience at the Institut d’Assistència Sanitària, which has developed a groundbreaking experimental cardiac rehabilitation model called “A Girona, m’hi veig amb cor” (“In Girona, with all my heart”). The model makes use of the urban parks in the towns around the province of Girona to carry out physical exercise programmes with maintenance-phase patients using simple yet constant monitoring techniques. These prevention and assistance measures carried out in Girona mean that the region is now considered a “cardio-protected” area.

When the floor was opened up for questions, some of the professionals present described their experiences in this field and highlighted the prominent role of physiotherapists in these practices.