Hollowed out by graft and underfunding, hospitals are poorly staffed and ill-equipped
Bucharest — Already battling pancreatic cancer, the ordeal for a patient at one of Romania’s top hospitals was about to get unimaginably worse.
But the gruesome tale should come as no surprise: Romania spends less on health care than any other EU member-state, has the highest mortality rate from treatable diseases and one of the bloc’s lowest life expectancies. The government has built one new hospital in three decades. In one, prosecutors established that a hyperbaric chamber for treating burns was bought by managers at a Bucharest hospital at seven times market value. When the time came to use the equipment — after a fire in a nightclub in 2015 — it turned out to be only suitable for anti-ageing procedures.
While staff salaries have been boosted repeatedly, doctors and nurses leave the country in droves for jobs in richer Western European nations, exacerbating a labour drought that’s afflicting the whole of the continent’s east.
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