Following the project funded by the Vodafone Romania Foundation,
- Infant mortality rate has fallen by almost 30% from 2013 to present
- Over 1,500 seriously ill children from all over the country have been hospitalized and treated over the last five years
Bucharest, November 28, 2018 – The Newborn Intensive Care Unit of the Marie Curie Hospital in Bucharest, inaugurated exactly five years ago under a project developed by the Inima Copiilor Association and financially supported by the Vodafone Romania Foundation, can now hospitalize and treat up to 400 newborn patients annually, i.e. three times more babies than five years ago. In its five years of activity, over 1,500 babies with serious health problems from all over the country have been hospitalized and treated here. Built from scratch, the intensive care unit is currently considered the most modern of its kind in Southeastern Europe. Compared to the old unit, which had a capacity of only 11 beds and a total area of 190 m2, the newly built hospital wing has a total of 4 floors, a capacity of 27 beds and is eight times larger, reaching a total area 1,600 m2.
The old unit was forced to refuse to hospitalize as many as 200 children each year, because of its insufficient capacity and the absence of the medical equipment required to treat the little patients. Presently, the number of surgeries performed in this department, thanks to the modern medical facilities it has been fitted with, has almost tripled, reaching from 72 in 2013 to around 200 today. The up-to-date infrastructure of the newborn intensive care unit allows conversion of individual wards into surgery theaters. Besides, the number of patients that are saved each year at this section has risen from about 120 in 2013 to over 300 at present. Although the level of complexity of the treated cases has increased from year to year, the ICU is now capable to handle some of the most severe cases in Romania, i.e. children who would have no chance to survive if hospitalized at other medical centers, which is why the mortality rate has fallen from almost 14% to around 10%, i.e. a drop of nearly 30% since 2013.
The total investment in the building and endowing of the new intensive care unit has reached EUR 2.5 million so far, of which the contribution of the Vodafone Romania Foundation is worth EUR 1.8 million. The success of the project has also attracted further investments totaling about EUR 3.5 million.
The newborn intensive care department built under the project developed jointly by the Inima Copiilor Association and the Vodafone Romania Foundation has 18 individual wards, each equipped with modern medical gas installations, air conditioning units and monitoring devices, accommodation spaces for parents, consultation rooms, as well as a training room, medical staff rooms and a room where parents of the hospitalized children are provided with psychological counseling.
The Vodafone Romania Foundation has developed for the new Marie Curie Hospital Newborn Intensive Care Unit a dedicated telemedicine solution that allows real-time remote monitoring and easy and secure access to the patients’ medical data.
The Vodafone Romania Foundation is a Romanian nongovernmental charitable organization, established in 1998, which operates separately and independently from the Vodafone Romania SA’s business. During its 20 years of activity, Vodafone Romania Foundation has funded 1,104 programs run by 706 NGOs throughout the country, in the fields of healthcare, education and social services. These projects had a total of 2.7 million beneficiaries – children, young and old people and physically, socially or economically disadvantaged people. So far, the Vodafone Romania Foundation has invested over 28 million euros in projects run by nonprofit partner organizations. More details about the Foundation’s programs are available at fundatia-vodafone.ro, http://jurnaldebine.fundatia-vodafone.ro/ and www.facebook.com/fundatiavodafone.
