Romanian
Nursing
Background
Low
wages and a 40 year dearth of medical information left Romania with
little real nurse training and very poor standards.
This
meant that although many Romanians have been struggling to improve things, patients
lack the care and professional standards that we in the West take for granted.
Over the
years we have tried our best to implement change at a national level
through various initiatives. While some of these have had little
impact, this is too important a subject to walk away from. So we
are now working from the grassroots up.
We translated
the Bailliere's Nursing Dictionary into Romanian
- with the kind permission of Ballieres and the generous funding
of our kind friend the late Maria Bjornson RIP
(whose grandmother was the first Romanian woman to qualify as
a medical Doctor).
This was
sent this to all the nursing schools, hospitals and given free to
many Romanian nurses.
Among our major initaitives
was a pioneering programme to ensure better standards of
nursing care in children's hospital units.
This project, at a major
children's hospital in Bucharest, centered around corrective surgery
for Romanian orphans. Owing to the culture of families looking after
children when they are in Romanian hospitals, there was a major
need to ensure that these children without families received proper
care and attention.
There was also a pressing
need to support
and fund the motivated Romanian nurses to implement changes
in the hospital and sidestep the traditional system of those child
patients whose families were forced to pay for decent care by "private
payments" to medical staff, simply to ensure they do their
job.
Accordingly we set up
a training and monitoring programme, and funded extra nursing care.
This
introduced care plans for each child and provided the resources
needed to provide adequate care and improve infection control in
the wards and Intensive Care departments.
In adition we supplied
play rooms for the children with full time play workers.
Our day to day involvement
in the programme ended in late 2003. However we still keep a "watching
brief" in that we continue to employ the coordinator on
a part time basis. We also continue to fund a play worker to ensure
the children are stimulated.
We are happy to report
that some of those involved in the programme have recently moved
into senior postions in the hospital where their dedication and
motivation will ensure improvements for all the patients. We hope
this will spread to other hospitals as originally envisaged.
We have now changed gear
by focussing on a major infection control programme
at the hospital. This involves:
-
UK study visits for key personnel
- Improved resources
- Link nurse pilot projects
- Hand washing campaign
- Nurse and doctor education programmes
- Improved data collection and analysis
- We fund essentail materials eg swabs, microbiologal swabs, new
elbow taps, soaps, towels, bin liners and cleaning trolleys.
The
study has been published in a Romanian medical journal demonstrating
enourmous improvements in contamination rates. The aim is to show
what's possible and get the authorities to provide these bare necessities
and promote this model throughout Romania.
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those in need in Romania please click
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