“Health infrastructure is critical, we are far behind the EU”

Doctor Victor Costache returned to Romania after studying and working for 12 years in France.

“I am a graduate of the UMF Iași and in 2001 I decided to follow the residency in France. It was not just a simple decision because you cannot decide to follow the residency in another country, you have to pass a difficult exam. This is how I learned for the boarding competition , it is called in France, the equivalent of our residency. I finished it in the universities of Toulouse and Grenoble. I started cardiovascular surgery, I became a specialist, for one year I was sent by the University of Grenoble to work in Canada, as part of an inter-university fellowship.

Western universities consider the exchange of experience very important. And then I became a primary care physician in cardiovascular surgery in Nancy. The first public-private mixed cardiovascular surgery service in France. In 2013, after 12 years, I returned to the country, being invited by the then management of Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu and the management of Polisano Hospital, which was a private hospital in Sibiu, to found a unique cardiovascular surgery center in that region, a public-private partnership in health, a collaboration between the state university and the private hospital,” he says.

The specialist warns that the health infrastructure in Romania is in a critical state.

“Health infrastructure is critical, we’re far behind compared to what’s happening in Western Europe and the EU. We’re behind on one more thing in health and we’ll be severely penalized if we don’t update it. We lagged behind in medical services. They are still at the level of 20 years ago. I mean their quality and settlement. We will succeed in having regional hospitals for nothing, I hope we will succeed in building the 25 health units, modernizing them, located in the PNRR. We criticize the funding services that we adopted from Australia, they work very well in the EU. Unfortunately, we underline the Australian system, all services are underfunded, and thus the Romanian patient does not have the same chance at life as the European patient”, says the doctor.