It was about this time, last year, when we met with the team members of Neurocare, a bunch of enthusiastic and most of all, especially determined people. Their collaboration with the Vodafone Romania Foundation has been materialized in a project called: „Epilepsy can be cured„. We had a chat in order to find out how the Neurocare Association was founded and which are the elements that motivate their daily activity. Here’s what they told us:
„The first semester as a medical student is … magic! You can already imagine yourself performing open heart surgeries and saving lives. You dream of solving mysterious diagnoses, kind of the way Dr. House does, and of patients who look at you in admiration. There is no trace of frustration or helplessness. You have not yet learned about the feeling you experience when you are waiting in vain, money is scares and patients are dissatisfied. During college time, days go by slowly but beautiful. Then you go through a competition and become a resident in a specialty of your choice. From that point on, another 4 years have to pass for you to become a medical doctor.
By that time you have learned that the magic of the first semester only lasts for a short while. You have also discovered that you are unable to save patients in the absence of medical equipment, no matter how much you wish you could. And you face a choice: let the „whale System” swallow you and accept the moral extinction … or fight for solutions!
So we, a handful of pediatric neurologists, chose to seek for solutions and to fight for them! In 2011, united by the desire to help and inspired by the energy of the children in our care, we established an NGO: the Association Neurocare. Founding members are volunteers, doctors and nurses who have supported each other all these years and have found a way to replenish their enthusiasm and their moral resources.
7 months later we were organizing our first event with the scope of increasing awareness for epilepsy, followed by a fundraising campaign for the acquisition of a Neuroendoscope.
In February 2015 we applied for funding through the „Mobile for Good” program of the Vodafone Romania Foundation. Our desire, still a utopia one year 1 year before, began to come alive: we could equip the hospital, work with a last generation electroencephalograph to monitor our patients, provide them with examinations at high standards. We were introducing telemedicine in the hospital.
The project „Epilepsy can be cured” is ongoing and we have registered an obvious qualitative leap in diagnosing and treating epilepsy in children. We work overtime, outside “usual business hours”, but we receive a lot of encouragement coming from our patients, parents of the treated children, from our friends and families. Although time is scares and administrative hindrances seem to multiply, we feel that the magic of the first semester is slowly returning to our hearts”.
„Epilepsy can be cured” is a project developed by the Association Neurocare under the umbrella of „Mobile for Good„.
