This EU-funded project will build an 849-bed Regional Emergency Hospital in Cluj, Romania, equipped with advanced technology to treat critically ill patients. It is part of efforts to ensure better quality emergency care and facilitate access to life-saving medical services in the country’s largely rural North West region.
Saving lives – New regional emergency care hospital for Cluj, Romania
- 14 July 2020
The facility will provide secondary and tertiary-level care, but also primary care and basic services such as general surgery and internal medicine.
Acute and critical care
Of the 849 beds, 744 will be dedicated to acute inpatient care. These will be divided, according to surgical and medical specialties, into six ‘centres’: head and neck; chest; abdominal; joint, spine and trauma; internal medicine; and mother and child. The remaining 105 beds will be for critical care patients, including those needing burn care.
Wherever possible, the wards will be mixed gender and have between eight and 20 beds.
The building will have seven storeys. The wards will be located in towers extending from the second to the fifth floors. Terraces above the first and third floors will be covered with vegetation. The building will be designed to accommodate an anticipated change from longer-term stays to increasing short-term, day, or ambulatory care.
Inpatient and outpatient care
The inpatient wards will be divided into surgical, medical, gynaeco-obstetrics, paediatrics, intensive and cardiac critical care, and burns.
Outpatient care will be divided into three ‘models’, depending on the type of care required. For the first model, doctors’ offices are incorporated into the clinics to deliver outpatient care – such as ear, nose and throat, ophthalmology and dentistry.
In the second model, administrative offices are separate from the clinics. This includes cardiothoracic, paediatric and neurosurgery, neurology, cardiology, plastic surgery, orthopaedics, and internal medicine.
The third model will combine administrative offices, outpatient clinics and inpatient services to ensure continuity of patient care.
All clinics will have between two and four examination rooms per doctor, operate for eight hours a day, 243 days per year. Clinical support services will include a pharmacy, radiology, and a laboratory.
A better healthcare system
The project contributes to Romania’s efforts to increase – and reduce inequalities in – access to healthcare. It will do so by ensuring early diagnosis and treatment and thereby helping to reduce deaths and long-term disabilities, especially for people living in rural and impoverished areas.
More efficient treatment of life-threatening conditions will be achieved thanks to modern infrastructure and equipment, better organisation and management.
The hospital will form part of a network of regional emergency hospitals that are intended to ensure complex cases can be treated in a multidisciplinary approach.
Keeping scarce skills
By providing an attractive working environment for doctors and nurses, the project will help counteract the brain drain of medical staff from the region.
The hospital will function as a teaching and training hospital for Cluj-Napoca’s university of medicine and pharmacy, and its technical university, which in turn will supply the hospital with new staff.
Total investment and EU funding
Total investment for the project “The construction and equipping the regional emergency hospital in the North West Region” is EUR 539 596 927, with the EU’s European Regional Development Fund contributing EUR 47 000 000 through the “Regional Operational Programme Romania” Operational Programme for the 2014-2020 programming period. The investment falls under the priority “Social inclusion”.