NGO wants to rebuild biggest children’s hospital in Romania

Daruieste Viata (Give Life), the NGO that is building the first hospital in Romania financed with private donations, plans to expand its initiative and rebuild the Marie Curie pediatric emergency hospital in Bucharest, the biggest such hospital in the country, at Western standards.

“We have finalized the structure of the first pediatric oncology and radiotherapy hospital and we have started working on the installations, compartmentalizing, and exterior and interior design phase. In 2020, it will be functional,” said Oana Gheorghiu, one of the two founders of the Daruieste Viata Association. “But the Marie Curie Hospital doesn’t treat just oncology and surgery cases. This is why we have started working on a master plan to ensure the same treatment standards for all the hospital’s sections,” she added.

The master plan includes the construction of a new building, similar to the one already completed, and the equipment. The new building will also be developed in the yard of the Marie Curie Hospital. The end-goal is to have a modern hospital, capable of offering children multidisciplinary treatment for any condition, at Western standards.

“Our goal is that this hospital becomes a European hospital, where the medical team works multidisciplinary and efficiently, a hospital where norms and medical procedures are respected so that the intra-hospital infections rate declines and the patient’s waiting time is reduced, a digitalized hospital where we eliminate bureaucracy and focus on what’s really important – the patients and their comfort,” said Carmen Uscatu, the other founder of the Daruieste Viata initiative.

Oana Gheorghiu and Carmen Uscatu launched their initiative in 2015. Since then, the NGO has raised EUR 26 million from over 1,700 companies and 260,000 private donors to build a pediatric oncology and radiotherapy hospital in Bucharest, next to the Marie Curie pediatric emergency hospital. The new hospital’s structure is completed.

These days, the association is in the middle of a scandal after Bucharest mayor Gabriela Firea shared a Facebook post in which fashion designer Dana Budeanu accused Oana Gheorghiu and Carmen Uscatu of not managing the money from donations properly and requesting help from the Health Ministry. The message’s tone was rather offensive, prompting a reaction from Oana Gheorghiu, who said that, by sharing this post, the Bucharest mayor offended the 260,000 donors who contributed to the project. The conflict escalated when Firea accused Gheorghiu and Uscatu of using children with cancer in a political campaign and said that they were just a front for former health minister Vlad Voiculescu, the founder of MagiCAMP and a possible opponent for the current mayor in next year’s elections.

Firea also claimed that her contribution to this project was not recognized, although she allowed the NGO to use a land plot belonging to the municipality worth EUR 1 million for the project.