- The beginning of this year marks the completion of the demolition works and the start of the reconstruction stage of the Newborn Intensive Care Unit Rehabilitation Project
Bucharest, January 17, 2018 – The modernization of the Newborn intensive care unit of the Constanta County Hospital, which has not been renovated since 1968, the year when the hospital was built, marks the completion of the first and the most complex stage of the renovation works, consisting of the demolition of the old structure and space rearrangement according to the new architectural design. The newborn intensive care unit, which will have a net area of 800 square meters and a total of 26 beds, has entered the second phase of the construction project, which includes, among others, interior partitioning works, the installation of electrical and air conditioning equipment and the building of the outdoor steel structure for the mounting of the air treatment plant. The project is being developed through a partnership between the Vodafone Romania Foundation and the associations Children’s Hearts and Give Wings.
By the end of the construction and installation works, the Newborn Intensive Care Unit will have been equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment, including a telemedicine solution enabling doctors to monitor the newborns also from outside the hospital and to send vital medical data and organize video conferences with specialist doctors from other hospitals in Romania and from abroad.
The budget of the entire project is estimated at 1.3 million euros. Funding will be provided through a national fundraising campaign organized by the associations Children’s Hearts and Give Wings, with the Vodafone Romania Foundation following to double the amount raised from donations.
“We are starting this year by marking an important milestone of the construction project now underway at the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at the Constanta County Hospital, the largest project currently funded by the Vodafone Romania Foundation. We will continue to support this project in 2018, so that the newborn unit may be completed and able to run to the latest standards in the field, for the benefit of the little patients who are to be treated here. We are happy to be involved and to have the opportunity to use and prove once again the power of the top of the line technology, again in the form of a telemedicine solution to be implemented at the newborn intensive care unit, designed to increase the babies’ chances to survive”, said Angela Galeta, Director of the Vodafone Romania Foundation.
Every year, the newborn intensive care unit in Constanţa treats 1,000 sick newborns from Constanţa County and from three other counties in the south-east of the country: Tulcea, Ialomita and Calaraşi. Infant mortality rate in this area is the highest in the country and three times the European infant mortality rate.
The unit is going to be fitted with medical gas facility, air conditioning, individual monitoring devices, incubators and state-of-the-art medical equipment, as well as with specialized furniture, special rooms for parents and for the medical staff, a psychological counseling room for parents and with medical examination rooms.
Following the model of the modernization project developed by the Marie Curie Hospital in Bucharest, where a hospital wing was built from scratch in 2013, representing the largest financing granted by the Vodafone Romania Foundation so far, the newborn intensive care unit of Constanta Hospital will be also equipped with a telemedicine solution allowing the secure transmission in real-time of images and medical parameters of the patients being examined and the remote monitoring of their vital signs. This is the tenth telemedicine project implemented by the Vodafone Foundation in Romania, with the first one implemented on SMURD ambulances, in 2005, which represented a premiere at that time in Romania.
