The Hospital for Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation ‘Prim Dr Martin Horvat’ in Rovinj keeps blazing a trail of success. They recently renovated the hospital beach and transformed it into the first beach in Croatia accessible to people with severe physical disabilities, and they’ve been seeing an annual profit of more than HRK 1 million for the last two years.
Such an impressive growth points to a presence of a great hospital director, one who’s capable of managing a major health institution and who does his job with a passion. Another confirmation of success for the Rovinj hospital comes in form of an award given to its director Marinko Rade, M.Sc. Orth Med, PhD in Clinical Medicine. Rade took away the international ‘Spine Young Investigator Award’ for the best young scientist in 2017 – for the second time, as he’s already a proud holder of the same award from 2014. He was presented with the award at the world symposium of the International Society for the Study of Lumbar Spine that was held in Athens.
Every year, the award winner is decided by the American scientific magazine ‘Spine’, the most influential journal in the field of diagnostics and surgical treatment of spine deformities. Rade got the 2014 award for two of his research papers that were published in Spine; he presented a new method that enables measuring nerve signals inside the spinal canal. As the canal is mostly composed of bone, up until now, the only way to measure movement of nerves and the spinal cord was to do an open surgery. Rade and his colleagues from the Kupio University Hospital in Finland, where he works as a post-doctoral fellow, have spent a couple of years researching and improving a less invasive method.
“We’ve been working hard for three years. I’ve travelled to Finland countless times, we’ve been getting up at 5 in the morning to have meetings via Skype to analyse the latest data before we went on to our day jobs. In those three years, we managed to prove that the nerves move through the vertebral canal, and that we can anticipate such movement, so we created a model that explains the whole process”, said Rade. Results of the latest research that got him the 2017 award were published in a paper titled ‘Reduced Spinal Cord Movement with the Straight Leg Raise Test in Patients with Lumbar Intervertebral Disc Herniation’.
As if leading a hospital and travelling back and forth to Finland to do innovative research weren’t enough, Rade also works as a fellow at the Faculty of Medicine in Osijek. He’s the only scientist from Croatia and the region to have won the prestigious award, which he called extremely valuable in the field of medicine: “It’s like the New York Times awarded the best young journalist in the world”. He’s also the only person in the world to have won the Spine award twice. All that in less than five years since he obtained his PhD, proving hard work and dedication always pay off. A much-needed success story coming from Croatia – congratulations to the amazing doctor!
Source: Zg Magazin
