​Limited attendance. Registrations are approved individually.

​In 1984, the journal Science published a small study that changed how hospitals are built. Surgery patients whose window looked out onto trees went home sooner and needed fewer strong painkillers than patients whose window faced a brick wall.

​Today the best healthcare buildings are designed around that kind of evidence: around the real patient, the one who is tired, frightened and far from home, not the ideal one on paper. It's exactly what we keep asking of clinical trials.

​On 13 October, come and see it in action. Join us at the first Maggie's Centre in mainland Europe, run by Fundació Kālida, for an evening of stories, good wine and conversation in one of Barcelona's most beautiful gardens.

​❤️ By hosting here, TrialHub is supporting Kālida's "Donate a Day" programme, funding a full day of free emotional, psychological and practical support at the centre for people living with cancer and their families.

​🍷 The evening

​🚌 18:00 Meet us at Booth 54 at SCOPE, and we'll take the bus together from InterContinental to Centre Kālida Sant Pau.

​🍸 18:45 Drinks in the garden as the sun goes down. Your hosts, Maya Zlatanova and Montse Barceló Riera, have a few surprises lined up. You'll hear the story of Kālida from the people who run it, followed by a short conversation on designing trials for real patients, not ideal ones.

​✨ 21:30 An after-dark guided tour through the Sant Pau modernista complex, led by Montse, including the underground galleries that once connected the hospital's pavilions

​🚌 22:00 The bus takes us back to the InterContinental

​🧡 Who was Maggie?

​Maggie Keswick Jencks was a writer and garden designer. Sitting in a windowless hospital corridor during her own cancer treatment, she began to picture something else: a place beside the hospital where anyone affected by cancer could walk in, no appointment needed, and find support, a cup of tea and people who understood.

​She did not live to see it. The first Maggie's Centre opened in Edinburgh in 1996, a year after her death. Today there are centres across the UK and beyond, all built on her wish that people should not "lose the joy of living in the fear of dying."

​🌿 Architecture that cares

​Maggie believed buildings could lift people's spirits, so every Maggie's Centre is designed by a leading architect and built around a kitchen table rather than a reception desk.

​Kālida is Benedetta Tagliabue's answer to that brief. Its floor plan opens like a flower, there is more garden than interior, and wide windows with handmade wooden louvres blur the line between inside and out. The garden, with its patios, trees and pergola, is where much of the centre's life happens. Its brick and ceramic tiles echo Sant Pau next door, where more than a century ago Domènech i Montaner built a hospital of pavilions set in gardens, linked by underground galleries.

​🦄 Why unicorns?

​In clinical research, the "unicorn patient" fits every criterion, lives next to the site and never misses a visit. They are easy to design for and almost impossible to find. Like unicorns.

​Real patients have jobs, families, long journeys and bad days. At TrialHub we believe that understanding the patient you are designing a trial for, their life and not only their diagnosis, is where better trials begin.

​P.S. There's one hiding in the picture.