| Popis: |
“Nothing teaches you more than knowing you have little time left,” Albert J Jovell said to a newspaper in 2012. He himself had been a committed student since he was diagnosed with a rare neuroendocrine cancer of the thymus in 2001. Over the years he experienced repeated relapses, until the disease ended his life in 2013. As well as being a doctor, therefore, Jovell was also a patient, and he dedicated many years to defending the rights of patients as president of the Spanish Patients’ Forum. The forum is known as “the patient’s voice in democracy”, and represents most of Spain’s patients’ organisations. Jovell was also director of the Patients’ University at the School of Medicine and Surgery of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. One of his achievements was the “political agenda” of the Spanish Patients’ Forum, which established specific policy actions to improve patients’ quality of life and participation in political decisions. Jovell himself wanted to call it “the political and social agenda.” He would have been happy to know that recent protests forced the end of the largest plan to date to privatise Spain’s healthcare system. “For Spaniards, the right to healthcare is associated with the respect for human dignity, something independent from people, social class, and facts,” he wrote in a BMJ blog. Jovell graduated in medicine from the University of Barcelona (UB) in 1986, and in sociology and political sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1990. He held a doctorate in sociology from the UB, and a doctorate in public health and an MPH from Harvard; furthermore he was director of the Global Institute of Public Health and Health Policy of the International University of Catalunya. His numerous articles mostly focused on the need to humanise medicine. “He thought that the survival of cancer patients should be measured in units of happiness,” says Sergio Minue, a GP and professor at the Andalusian School of Public Health. ForMinue, Jovell’s illness and ultimate death were “a chronicle of a death foretold: not only did he not deny his illness, but he showed it, almost proudly, as a way to support many sick, anonymous people who carry their suffering almost in secret.” Jovell was generous with his time and always available to answer health journalists’ questions. On those occasions when he was too ill he would find someone else to speak on his behalf. One of those persons was the sociologist Giovana Gabrielle who said, “Collaborating with him meant to raise the voice of the patient to the highest authorities at a national, regional, European and international level. [...] He taught me to hate bureaucracy, to work with independent criteria, not to trust appearances, to value the time that we give, to cherish ourselves depending on the extent of our merits, not to waste or give away our time in vain, rarely to say ‘no,’ and to be forever grateful.” Jovell is survived by his wife, Maria Dolores Navarro Rubio, a specialist in preventive medicine and public health; and their two sons. |
