Probes in the case of children tied to their beds in Buzau hospital

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Children tied to their beds, babies that died in suspicious conditions: the press is full of such cases these days, which cast a bad light upon the Romanian medical system.

The Buzau County Council yesterday demanded the manager of the County Hospital to take measures against the head of the Children’s Section of the hospital, where children were tied to their beds with bandages, so “the chief of the section is urgently replaced.” Laurentiu Gavrila, the chairman of the investigative commission formed by the Buzau County Council, said that the County Hospital had the obligation to inscribe the incriminated measures into a special book and the management of the Children’s Section should have sought the approval of the General Department of Child Assistance and Protection. On the other hand, the president of the Buzau College of Physicians, Ion Japie, and Nicolae Enache, the chief of the Neuropsychiatry Section of the Buzau Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Children and Teenagers yesterday held a joint press conference in which they affirmed that patients with severe mental illnesses “may be restrained” so “they do not hurt themselves.” “The law allows the restraining of these patients because there is the risk of tearing their perfusions or hurting themselves,” psychiatrist Nicolae Enache explained.After the media aired images of children tied to their beds at the Buzau County Hospital, the management of the Children’s Section of the hospital justified the situation through the lack of personnel. The chief of the Children’s Section of the Buzau County Hospital, Carmencita Matei said that all those tied to their beds are “children with serious problems,” which remove their perfusions. They come from foster homes and have nobody to look over them, she added. “The children with people taking care of them are not tied. This is a situation that should not happen,” the chief of the Children’s Section of the Buzau County Hospital mentioned, quoted by Mediafax. According to the same source, responsible for this situation is the lack of personnel, because only six nurses and two orderlies must take care of 66 children in the respective section. “We will untie them, but God forbid something bad happens to them from now on. They must be closely supervised, because they remove their perfusions and fall from bed,” she added.The head of the Buzau Public Health Department, Venera Acsinte told Mediafax yesterday that the employees of the Children’s Section of the Buzau County Hospital do not know the laws and do not think they did anything wrong, given the understaffing problems. “I am intrigued by the fact that they were unaware that, legally, one may not tie someone,” she said. On the other hand, the spokeswoman of Buzau County Police, chief commissary Florina Crucianu announced yesterday that a probe is conducted to see whether the legal conditions are met to sanction the medical staff of the Buzau hospital for such a crime.The Buzau County Hospital was also the scene of another serious situation. An 11-month baby girl of Lopatari died Saturday, after she had been discharged the previous day from hospital, where she had been admitted on January 20 for fever and symptoms specific to a respiratory disease.

Probe targets Resita hospital, too

The parents of a baby that was born at the Resita Emergency Hospital complained to the Caras-Severin Public Health Department and the College of Physicians because, two hours after their child was born, they were announced that it had a broken arm, although initially they had been told that he was healthy. According to the Caras-Severin Public Health Department, the parents refused the transport of the baby to the Timisoara Hospital and want it to be treated in Resita.