The National Children's Hospital is the highest priority of all the priorities of the state. There is no health minister who does not show how concerned he is. But what happens. For some time, DANS and the Anti-Corruption Commission have started to get the members of the Public Council to build a National Children's Hospital. He is already talking to FACTS Maria Brestnichka, but the saga continues. Here's how… Journalist Nadezhda Tsekulova told FACTS the details.
- Mrs. Tsekulova, members of the Public Council for the construction of a National Children's Hospital continue to be trained. After DANS, the new Anti-Corruption Commission intervened. What is happening?
- The investor in the private project "Mom and Me" has submitted a series of reports to the services against the members of the Public Council. These alerts are currently being investigated.
- Are they calling you for questioning or for a conversation?
- Until now, no one has used the word "interrogation". Both services informed us that they are conducting a preliminary check and are obliged to take information from us.
- Is the public council now the problem so that we don't have a National Children's Hospital?
- According to some paid publications of the last weeks - apparently. However, I want to remind you that the public council has been in existence for a year, and the national children's hospital, unfortunately, has been a failed project for four decades, and only in the last two years has there been any progress, albeit slow.
The public council tries to speak publicly about issues that are not close to citizens outside the health system, but are of key importance to whether there will be a children's hospital and what it will be like - about quality, about standards, about processes, about staffing . In addition to speaking publicly, we also try to engage the institutions to do their work in solving these problems. This is obviously not well received by everyone.
- How many times were you introduced to the topic in DANS?
- We met twice with the employees of DANS - once to hand me the summons and once more - to give my explanations.
- What is DANS interested in and what is the Anti-Corruption Commission interested in?
- The questions that were asked by the national security agency were also announced by the parliamentary tribune during the hearing of the chairman Plamen Tonchev. They were related to the position that the Public Council for the construction of a national children's hospital took regarding the investment intention to build a private hospital with 11 narrow children's specialties in Sofia.
The CPC was interested in whether I had an activity that placed me in a conflict of interest with the National Children's Hospital project. The reason was a signal that matched - in my opinion almost verbatim - a publication in an online publication that I cannot call media.
- We saw what happened to the children's hospital in Kyiv, which was hit by a rocket. Victims, injured, children with systems on the street, and in our country we are still talking about where and how to build it... Will there be an end to the saga?
- Russian attacks on the civilian population of Ukraine, including a children's hospital in Kiev, were shocking to everyone, as if a new level of inadmissibility had been passed in this war. But I don't think it's good to mix the two topics.
Your questions catch me at a time when I think we need to reaffirm whether children's health care is a real political priority and not just a poster theme that looks good on election platforms. Having or not having a Public Council affects the transparency of work on the project, but for now it cannot sufficiently influence the presence or absence of political will and administrative capacity to work on it. So my short answer is - I don't know. I don't know if there will be an end to the saga, or to be more precise - I don't know how the saga will end and when. And the political turbulence that has shaken the institutions at fairly short intervals in recent years also changes the possible answers to this question.
- Purely documentary, how is the project moving with the construction of the children's hospital?
- In recent months, the process of building the building has moved with some predictability. Efforts are being made to meet deadlines and we all see the photos from the clearing of the field in Gorna Banya. By the end of the month, we expect the consulting consortium to propose the structure, scope and capacity of the future National Children's Hospital, so that a functional plan can be started. This gives us reason to believe that the construction of a modern, high-tech children's hospital that combines the highest standards in pediatric care in the EU finally seems feasible.
However, we still do not see movement on creating the concept of how to fill this modern building with quality content. Will all the existing university children's clinics, which are currently scattered in more than ten hospitals in Sofia, be gathered under the roof of the National Children's Hospital? If so, how will they convince their teams to move there? How can such a move happen without risk to patients? Where will the shortage of doctors and especially the shortage of nurses come from? Which of the current pediatric structures will remain and will not become part of the NDB?
These are complex issues, and the NDB needs analysis prepared at the end of last year contains proposals for solving some of them. But if we don't want to get a building in 2028 that is not able to fulfill the functions for which it was created, the institutions must in time.