Fundación MAPFRE 2016 Awards

In October 1987, the Municipality of New York launched Project Help, conceived and run by Doctor Rojas Marcos.

It is the first mobile service comprising psychiatrists, nursing professionals and social workers, aimed at caring for and hospitalizing seriously mentally ill people who are defenseless and homeless and who walk the streets of the city, often putting their lives at risk. Once examined on the street, the sick people that need hospital care are admitted for doctors to give them another assessment and, if necessary, they are hospitalized in a special unit.

This project has served as a model for implementing these mobile services in major cities across the USA and Europe. Currently, 30 years after they began, New York has 24 interdisciplinary mental health mobile teams specialized in crisis situations that treat 11,500 sick people every year.

In Spain, these units operate, for example, in the Community of Madrid, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Malaga and Valencia.

This company specializes in passenger transport and belongs to the National Express group. Its goal is to make its employees the best professionals in the business, pursuing excellence through continuous improvement.

Drivers carry great responsibility: the safety of their passengers in is their hands. They transport more than 300 million people a year. Thus, the company values are based around customer satisfaction and the highest possible level of safety during journeys.

The objective of the ‘Eliminando Riesgos’ program is to constantly improve the skills of their professional staff through the implementation, control, monitoring and application of improvement measures. This series of measures translates into an investment in health and safety of nearly two and a half million euros and 55,000 driver training hours.

Thanks to everyone’s commitment and effort, the company has succeeded in reducing accidents by 31%.

Since it was set up in 2005, Fundación Aladina has helped children and teenagers with cancer and their families, providing comprehensive support: material, psychological and emotional. Every year the foundation provides services to more than 1,400 people.

We particularly wish to recognize the foundation for the ‘Program of Psychological Support for Children and Teenagers suffering from Cancer and their Families’, a daily volunteer program aimed at making hospital stays more bearable for children and their families by offering personalized psychological support.

Their work is crucial in ensuring that hospital stays go as well as they possibly can and that the disease can be coped with successfully. With this award we wish to recognize their selfless day in, day out collaboration. Their commitment helps hundreds of children deal with cancer on a daily basis.

The Foundation collaborates with a total of 12 Spanish hospitals. A major part of their other work includes refurbishments and improvements carried out in public hospitals to make stays more tolerable for the sick and their families: the Niño Jesús, Gregorio Marañón, 12 de Octubre and Getafe hospitals, all located in the Community of Madrid.

Doctor Valentín Fuster Carulla stands out for his unstinting efforts in developing his professional career in the field of scientific research, especially for his work on prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease, one of modern society’s most common ailments.

He was director of the Committee on Global Health and the Future of the United States and received the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research (1996). In 2006 he was appointed president of the World Cardiology Association.

During his career he has received recognition for his scientific advances in cardiovascular imaging (Arrogo Recordati International Prize, 2009) and for his translational research into atherothrombotic disease (Grand Prix Scientifique of the Institute of France, 2011).

He has recently been appointed General Director of the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) in Madrid and also won the prestigious Severo Ochoa Award for Biomedical Research. His Foundation SHE (Science, Health and Education) seeks to improve the overall health of the population, especially the young.

This award is a recognition of his contribution to scientific work and especially for his research into the workings of the heart and the treatment of its disorders. His work has had a tremendous impact on improving treatment for patients with heart problems and has led to improving many people’s lives.