Related Countries: Romania

SDC Cooperation Office:

Related Topics: Quality of health services, Health sector reforms and decentralisation, Maternal, newborn and child health

Project Description

The Romanian Swiss Neonatology project – RoNeonat – is a project of the Ministry of Public Health that is funded by SDC. The project started in 2002 with the aim of modernising the neonatology system in order to reduce the neonatal mortality in Romania. In the first two phases, two referral centres – Iasi and Tirgu Mures – were chosen and fully renovated by the Ministry of Health. From 2002 to 2005, the project contributed to the improvement of the quality of neonatology services in those two pilot centres through

• increased capacity of human resources
• procurement of adapted equipment
• support of neonatal emergency surgery
• development of guidelines and treatment protocols
• improvement of the transport systems of neonates
• long term follow-up of infants treated in neonatology intensive care units
• information campaigns for risk prevention

As this phase was implemented successfully, a next phase was launched to scale-up the experience to five additional centres – 2 in Bucharest (Giulesti and Polizu), Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu and Timisoara. Furthermore, this phase focused on the continuous improvement of quality of care including the multidisciplinary (neonatology, obstetrics, GP, etc.) and multilevel (level 1 to 3 of care, regionalisation) linkages, sustainability of high quality services through technical assistance. The capitalisation of experiences, developed products and lessons learnt provide advisory services to the Health Sector Reform Project (HSRP) of the Romanian Ministry of Health supported by the World Bank in terms of the national roll-out of this experience.

Objectives

The overall goal of RoNeonat is to reduce the neonatal mortality in Romania through the modernisation of the neonatology system. To address the issues of the Romanian neonatology system in order to improve its outcomes, the approach chosen was a systemic one that includes different subcomponents of the project who are directly and indirectly linked to the provision and access to high quality of neonatal health, such as guidelines development, health technology management, training of neonatologists, as well as obstetricians, anaesthesiologist and neonatal surgeons, health promotion campaign, quality improvement and management, follow-up of neonates, referral and transfer protocols and telemedicine communication platform.

More about this project

See PDF Project Description (download).

A capitalisation of experiences has been put together end of 2007 by the implementing agency, the Swiss Centre for International Health. Key interventions, documentation and lessons learnt from RoNeonat are presented on a CD-Rom, and can also be consulted at the following address: