Building bridges: connecting care and community

When António Parreira joined the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) more than a decade ago, the place was still more vision than institution. The building stood ready, white limestone gleaming by the river, but inside, there was little activity. “When I arrived, there were just two of us – two doctors,” he recalls. “It was too small then to think of a community.”

For Parreira, who had spent over twenty years at Lisbon’s Institute of Oncology, the invitation to join CF felt like stepping into the unknown. He saw it as both a challenge and an opportunity: to help build from scratch a new kind of clinical centre that combined care and research under a single roof. “The goal was to create an institution focussed on patient care and research at the same time, which is something very difficult to achieve anywhere in the world.”

The ambition to fuse medicine with discovery soon became the Champalimaud Foundation’s defining spirit. “We wanted to do patient-centred clinical work in a multidisciplinary environment,” he explains. “The idea was to bring innovation directly into clinical practice as soon as possible, to be inquisitive and open to new ideas in medicine.”

Those first years were an experiment in every sense. Decisions were not only scientific but structural: which cancers to focus on, how to organise the teams, even what kind of culture to create. “It was disruptive, for a facility in Portugal at the time,” he says, “because alongside traditional individual departments, we created multidisciplinary teams of clinicians from different specialities who work together and share services like radiology, nuclear medicine, pathology, surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy”.

From those modest beginnings, the centre grew with startling speed. “After two years, we had around twenty or thirty doctors,” he remembers. “Now, we’re approaching almost two hundred.”

Growth brought new energy and new challenges. How could such a large and diverse organisation stay connected? Parreira’s answer has always been simple: through proximity and shared purpose. “The solution is to get people talking, to work together and find common points of interest,” he says. “Sometimes that happens simply because there’s only one cafeteria! People complain about long queues or a lack of space, but sometimes, you end up in line next to a researcher, and a conversation begins. That can lead to an idea for a project that helps a patient”.

While crafting lunch lines to foster connection may seem far-fetched, he believes those unplanned encounters are the heart of bringing research and medicine closer. “Doctors and scientists often speak different languages,” he explains. “Doctors focus on understanding the patient as a whole person, while researchers are trained to break problems into components. The challenge is to bring those perspectives together to create a common language.”

When that happens, he adds, something remarkable occurs. “When you succeed in connecting these two worlds, you create something that is much more than the sum of its parts”.

This collaborative culture quickly expanded beyond the borders of Portugal. “We always wanted to be open to international collaboration, to welcome people from many different backgrounds. That diversity of ideas and experience is what makes science better, and what makes a community.”

But even the strongest cultures evolve. “It’s easier to pursue a vision when it’s new,” he reflects, “but harder to maintain it once it’s established. The younger generations have new priorities, and that’s natural. But the challenge is to preserve the same sense of mission”.

As the Champalimaud Foundation marks its twentieth anniversary this year, that mission remains a compass. “We must stay true to our founding principles: to do advanced, sophisticated clinical work in close collaboration with the scientific community, and to bring innovation into practice as soon as it’s validated by science.”

Technology, of course, will keep transforming medicine, but Parreira insists that what matters most is something that never changes. “No matter how advanced technology becomes, we should use it carefully, intelligently, to make us more efficient. But the human connection, the compassion for the patient, that must never change.”

For him, community is not just about colleagues or disciplines, it’s about a shared humanity. “You must always see the patient, not just the disease,” he says. “Each person is unique, and that is what patient-centred medicine means.”

It’s a simple conviction, yet it captures both his philosophy and the Champalimaud Foundation’s enduring vision: that progress in science and medicine begins with people, and with the communities they build together.

Before our conversation ended, António Parreira offered a question for his colleague, Joe Paton, Director of Neuroscience Research at CF, to consider in this article’s sister-edition:

“How can we make doctors more capable of sharing their concerns and intellectual questions with investigators? Closing that gap between the two sides is a constant effort. If we don’t cultivate that communication, daily routines will naturally pull people in different directions. People tend to isolate themselves in small groups – their own departments or units – and stop talking to others, even next door. So maintaining that openness requires continuous effort”.

Find out how Joe answered soon…
 

António Parreira, Clinical Director of the Champalimaud Clinical Centre, Champalimaud Foundation.

Text by John Lee, Content Developer at the Champalimaud Foundation’s Communication, Events and Outreach Team

Full 20 Years, 20 Stories Collection here.