The "For the Good" Foundation launched a campaign #Children's Hospitals in Bulgaria 2021 in the month before the elections for a new parliament. Her goal is to draw attention to the inhumane conditions in children's hospital wards. The photographs and testimonies of parents and their children's nightmares are the mirror in which politicians must look.
We want more people to see what children's hospital wards are like in an EU country in the 21st century. We want everyone who has been ruling for the last 30 years to be very ashamed. We want to mobilize the public to put pressure on the parliament and the executive until our children get modern health care in a healing environment with adequate care.
We are starting the campaign right in the month of the elections, because children's health care is absent from the pre-election programs and platforms of the parties and coalitions that, according to sociological surveys, will form the next 45th National Assembly.
The coalition GERB and SDS have not published an election platform. For the BSP, children's health care is limited to free medicines for children up to 14 years of age. In the pre-election preamble of the DPS, the phrase "children's health care" is missing. It is also missing in the priorities of "There is such a people". It is not in the management measures of the stand up platform. bg". The reform in children's health care is mentioned in passing in the program of Democratic Bulgaria. For some of the parties that can theoretically enter the new parliament, caring for children's health is nothing more than a reproductive and demographic problem or participation in mass sports.
Meanwhile, the sick children lie in rooms with mold, rust, cobwebs, dirt and cockroaches, fallen plaster, cracked tiles, greasy mosaic floors, broken beds, packed like a barracks, smelly communal toilets, missing taps and showers, tattered bedding, in which is teeming with life, missing equipment, non-working equipment. Parents sleep in chairs or don't sleep at all for days to prevent their sick baby from being hurt by the unsecured bed that has long been trashed. Parents frantically run between hospitals from city to city because for 40 years society has been waiting for a modern national multidisciplinary pediatric hospital. Parents are quick to forget the nightmare as soon as their child is discharged. The medical staff is either disheartened, or sour, or has long given up on this poisonous environment. There are exceptions, of course, just to make the contrast even more painful.
At the "For the Good" Foundation, we know how basic repairs are made to children's hospital wards and how much they cost - we do them with volunteers and donations. Although this is not our job, it is the duty of the hospital bosses, the municipalities and the state. If they don't know, we will tell them, we will support them. The excuse "they will break it again, they will steal it again" is not an argument for continuing the outrage.
If the motives for this campaign have not become completely clear to anyone by now, here is more:
The stress of being in hospital can take a toll on a child's psyche for life. The healing environment has long been accepted as the world standard in healthcare – the environment can speed up or slow down healing. It can make both children and adults sick. If you were terrified of the hospital as a child, as an adult you will put off going to the doctor until the last minute, even if you live in a country with an organized and humane health care system. Thus, the disease becomes difficult to treat, chronic or too late to treat.
When one window is broken and not replaced quickly, another window in the building will inevitably be broken, gradually it will be neglected, the area, the city will decline, crime and chaos will take place. The broken window theory illustrates how the deterioration of just one element of the environment grows into a feeling of disinterest, lack of norms and rules, lawlessness. How much worse can children's healthcare get?
The first stage of the Project for Good campaign will end with a public event after the constitution of the new National Assembly. Expect it.
Until then, share so more people can learn. Submit photos and stories of your children's stay in the miserable children's hospital rooms.
You can follow the testimonials in the group and on the Facebook page of #Project for Good.
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