This is the first time in Romania that an NGO has built a hospital from scratch, only out of donations and sponsorships.

Seeing as the State hasn't built anything related to Pediatric Oncology for 50 years, the Dăruiește Viață Association has taken on the mission of building the first Children's Hospital in Romania, built only from donations and sponsorships. The Hospital offers multidisciplinary care to children with severe diseases and is now functional.

The next step? Building a medical campus, so that all the children at Marie Curie Hospital can have access to the same treatment conditions, just like they would in Western Europe.

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THE STORY OF #NoiFacemUnSpital

Our project started in 2015 with our wish to improve the treatment conditions in the Pediatric Oncology department of the "Marie Curie" Hospital in Bucharest. In here, 30 kids and 30 grown-ups had to share two toilets at the end of the hallway and only one shower. As the old infrastructure of the building wouldn't allow us to add individual bathrooms to the wards, we decided to build a new clinic from scratch, with three floors that would only host the Oncology department.

The needs of the medical team and the incredible mobilization of our donors allowed us to expand the project. This way, what was initially supposed to be only a clinic turned into a full-blown hospital. The Hospital is now an approximately 12.000sqm construction, spanning 9 levels, with +140 beds, a heating plant with a data center (that serves the new building as well as the existing building of Marie Curie Hospital) and an ozonation plant.

The building hosts the first Pediatric Radiotherapy compartment in Romania (with two bunkers), an Intensive Care Unit with one-bed wards, a modern Operating Theater with 5 ORs, an Oncology department, a Hemato-Oncology department (with 5 clean rooms for transplant patients), a neurosurgical department and a surgical department.

As the project expanded, the investment needed changing as well, from 8 to 16 million euros for the structure of the building. In the end, the total investment is estimated around EUR 53 mil. (for the building and the equipment as well).

Follow the Hospital Diaries to find out how things went all throughout the project, here!

THE PROJECT EXPANDS EVEN MORE: we're turning "Marie Curie" Hospital into a Medical Campus. At the "Marie Curie" Hospital, it's not only children with cancer who need XXI-century treatment conditions, but all of them, regardless of their disease. For this reason, we've decided to expand the project with another building, in which to move all the departments of the hospital. The old building will be used as accommodation space for children, cafeteria, study spaces etc.

WHERE WE ARE TODAY Up to now, more than 350,000 individuals and 8,000 companies have supported the #NoiFacemUnSpital initiative. The hopital is functional and treating patients aged 0 to 18 years old.

WHAT THE NEW HOSPITAL BRINGS

A multidisciplinary approach in treating child patients. At this time, in Romania, we don't have a multidisciplinary approach in treating children with serious diseases, nor a hospital that follows West-European rules, protocols and medical procedures. This new hospital will have a multidisciplinary team, including an international scientific board and a tumor board to carefully analyze and plan approaches.

21st century medicine. This will be a hospital of the future, where technology can make the procedures more effective and offer friendlier facilities, that allow children to live out their childhood while fighting the disease. The hospital will have protocols to reduce the risk of infections, state-of-the-art equipment, adequate spaces for the patients and families, according to European standards (where the children can be separated according to age and disease), spaces for the parents, leisure time places - a cinema, a radio studio, etc.) and continuous training for the medical staff (including training abroad for the team of the Radiotherapy Department).

Innovation and technology. This new hospital will be a best practice example for the Romanian authorities, by digitizing the activity of the staff and implementing a BMS resource effectiveness system.

International partnerships. The Hospital is getting support and training from two of the most renowned hospitals in the world – Prinses Máxima Centrum of the Netherlands (the biggest pediatric oncology clinic in Europe) and St. Jude Reseach Hospital of the U.S. (one of the largest pediatric oncology hospitals in the world). 

A friendly and safe environment. The hospital will be a place that restores hope and faith for the sick children and their families. Here, the parents will find a safe, familiar environment, where they feel that everything possible is being done for their children.

The architectural concept: "Through this project, we want to change the entire concept of hospitals. When children enter the hospital, they'll actually be entering sort of a game, with themed rooms, an outdoor terrace, a library, a gym, where they can do various things and not get bored. The theme of this concept is 'The Tree of Life', where children will be able to access various worlds, for instance, the radiotherapy bunker will be an underwater universe or a hedgehog's den. We'll also launch an app, so that children can keep in touch with the outside world when they're in the hospital. What we want is for children and parents to stop fearing the hospital as they do right now.” (Raluca Șoaita, the architect of this project, Tesseract Architecture)