Burn Hospital could be relocated, Minister of Health says

The newly-appointed Minister of Health Vlad Voiculescu stated that the Burn Hospital in Bucharest does not fit the minimum standards required for a health care unit and that he is considering its full relocation. The minister, who volunteered at the hospital after the deadly Colectiv Club fire, said it was unacceptable that no lessons were learnt in its aftermath.

“I start by telling you how much I regret the situation of the patient at the Burn Hospital. The Burn Hospital is is a very critical situation – and not as of now. We have known about the situation at the Burn Hospital since the Colectiv [fire], at the latest, in November I was there as a volunteer. In the past two months, the two months I have been here, we’ve had several crisis situations at the Burn Hospital: the Valea Cascadelor case and that at the transfusions unit,” the minister said on Thursday at a press conference.

The Health Minister warned that the hospital was facing two major problems, namely “serious” management issues and lack of staff. “The week-end of the Valea Cascadelor explosion I was there in the hospital together with two of my advisors, both doctors. I saw the conditions in the hospital and one of my advisors, doctor Catalin Carstoveanu, spent a night there together with two nurses from Marie Curie in order to help the staff at the Burn Hospital in treating the patients, in order to make a report for me. The report illustrates a state of affairs that is no less serious than what you saw here this morning. Besides the serious management issues and the lack of staff, what needs to be said is that it is unacceptable that after Colectiv we have not learnt anything,” the Minister said in a press conference.

According to Voiculescu, the only reasonable move would be to move the entire hospital to a new location, a possibility he has been pondering on during the past few months. “Last week we had a meeting with managers of hospitals that can treat patients with severe burns, but the conclusion we reached was that we cannot close the entire hospital. What we did was to suspend the activity of the Transfusion Unit, which means that patients with severe burns were redirected.

Apart from relocating the hospital, a priority for his mandate, the Health Minister said that other measures are inspections, controls, fines and helping the hospital with any type of investment that is needed.

In Minister Voiculescu’s view, the current situation at the Bucharest hospital “is the result of a lack of vision, of the lack of action at this hospital. In practice, nobody did anything significant for this hospital. We can talk about making the management more professional, we can talk about concrete help, which we will and are already providing. There is a management problem, there is an infrastructure problem that cannot be neglected,” Voiculescu added at the press conference.

Georgeta Gheorghe