In March 2024, Tomasz A. consulted a neurologist at the University Hospital of Kraków and afterwards left a glowing review: “The doctor was very involved and interested in my problem,” he wrote. “I wish for myself and others that doctors everywhere would have this approach to patients.”
Sandra Sz. noted after a visit to the same doctor that he approached his patients with “great heart and understanding”.
Anna S. mentioned his “knowledge, intelligence, empathy [and] calmness” and concluded that her mom was “in the best hands”.
Katarzyna described the doctor as a “mega specialist and mega human”.
Agnes wrote that he even seemed to know her imaginary fears and talked to her about them.
Peter H. resorted to figures of speech: “Heals like no-one else, examines like gold, a doctor you can search for with a candle”.
Another patient simply concluded that Dr Paweł Wrona was “a man worth recommending”.
The picture that emerges from these descriptions is of someone who has been comprehensively schooled by life, a person perhaps whom long experience has endowed with rich reserves of knowledge and empathy. But the great heart and understanding that brought such solace to neurology patient Sandra Sz. unexpectedly belongs to a 35-year-old whose cherubic charm makes him appear even younger and who constantly seems to be supressing a smile.
No less of a surprise is that the school of empathy from which Dr Wrona graduated is not the Poznań University of Medical Sciences where he was awarded the rector’s scholarship for best student. Nor is it the Warsaw Management University where he completed an MBA in Clinical Trials last year, or the Jagiellonian University Medical College where he inspires future doctors with a passion for stroke.
No, the place where he learned to practice listening, caring and understanding, was the theatre. It was as a young actor in his home town of Krosno that he (to borrow the words of US theatre maker Bill English) built up the muscles of compassion. At 18 he and his theatre friends in Krosno founded Nocne Teatralia Strachy, an “alternative” arts festival of which he is now the director. But although the thought of a career in the arts crossed his mind, Paweł had already decided he wanted to be a doctor and why – “for helping people the best way I can”.
In the final month of his internship, however, the very young Dr Wrona had another decision to make. He drew three columns, labeled them General Practice, Psychiatry and Neurology, and listed the pros and cons of each. Neurology won, and the friends in Kraków from whom he sought advice confirmed it.
But however rigorous his decision-making process, he won’t deny that intuition may have been at work. “Maybe the heart knew,” Paweł says. So with heart and head pointing him in the same direction, the actor from Krosno embarked on the task of becoming a man worth recommending.
In May 2024, Dr Paweł Wrona traveled to Basel where to his considerable surprise he became the youngest ever recipient of an ESO Spirit of Excellence Award for exceptional services to stroke care. It’s a rare honour bestowed once a year during ESOC on five individuals from Europe who have left an indelible mark on stroke care in their countries. Standing in the shadow of professors Anna Członkowska and Adam Kobayashi as the third doctor from Poland to win the award, Paweł is cheerfully aware that he has just been handed a massive responsibility.
“It’s a big moment,” he says two days after the event. He’s having to use his stage voice because the exhibition hall at ESOC 2024 is being noisily dismantled as the conference draws to a close. “It will drive me to do more. I have lots of new ideas. I will help as much as I can, and I won’t stop. There is always something to do, something to improve.”
There are, for example, more stroke centres in his region to involve in quality monitoring, more doctors and nurses to train, more EMS workshops to address, more small and rural centres to support, the FAST Heroes campaign to champion, and a great deal to learn about people’s behaviour in acute stroke in an ambitious public awareness project to reduce delays between stroke onset and hospital arrival.
There are also of course territories to convert into Angels regions, more ESO Angels Awards to add to the seven diamonds his own hospital has won since 2021, and more caring to practice and kindness to dispense to the patients who come to him with their fears, both real and imaginary.
Every patient brings a story and every story is a puzzle, he says. The goal of improving stroke care is to have “fewer stories, less explaining to patients what has happened and why they’re disabled for the rest of their life”.
One such story is of a young man who had suffered an internal carotid artery dissection, a rare cause of stroke. He had reached the primary centre quite quickly, but only arrived at Dr Wrona’s Comprehensive Stroke Centre after a delay of six hours. The first hospital had wasted time waiting for lab results, then a neurologist had wanted to “have a look”, and the ambulance squandered an extra hour. By the time he arrived at the University Hospital of Kraków there was nothing to be done except a craniectomy to reduce the pressure on his brain.
After two years in rehab, this patient, though still battling aphasia, was finally able to walk and work, but, says Paweł, in a different set of circumstances he could have survived with no deficit at all.
There’s another story closer to home. Paweł was still in primary school when his grandmother had a stroke. Because no acute treatment was available, she spent the final years of her life paralysed and speaking with difficulty. He remembers his mother, a fulltime teacher raising two children, going to care for her every day. He remembers his mother crying.
These stories, Paweł says, musn’t happen again.
There are also other stories. They are the ones being told in theatre and cinema that help “free his mind”, and every autumn when Nocne Teatralia Strachy is held in Krosno. He was still in medical school when he realised the festival could be a platform for imparting crucial medical knowledge to a vulnerable demograpic. Now the programme every year includes an invitation to people of retirement age to attend arts and craft workshops that include lectures about stroke by Dr Paweł Wrona. Like the rest of the festival, these events are free. “Because you shouldn’t need money to receive culture,” the festival director believes.
While it goes without saying that he has made his mother proud, this isn’t something Paweł takes for granted. His hope that she will stay proud is something that drives him. He recalls an occasion when she went to the hospital for a blood test and spent 30 minutes in his waiting room where patients made her aware that she had raised a doctor you can search for with a candle, a man with great heart and understanding.
“Afterwards she said she was proud of me. It was the biggest compliment I could get.”
