Bucharest changed a lot in recent years, and on the services side, it has known a tremendous development. In this category falls also the healthcare network benefiting the capital of Romania, a network which expanded through massive investments and significantly improved its equipment. By the services they provide, the Hospitals under the administration of Bucharest City Hall, through the Hospitals and Healthcare Services Administration Bucharest (HMSAB), can compete on equal terms with the Western Healthcare Facilities.
Somewhere behind the Policlinica Titan / Titan Polyclinic, a new construction was built, which houses a Healthcare Facility dedicated to children. Here operates The Children’s Mental Health Center, The Pediatric Psychiatry Ward, but also the Children Day Stay Unit. All these Departments belong to „Dr. Constantin Gorgos” Psychiatric Hospital – Titan.
The Little Park Next to the Hospital
In the middle of September, I visited this Hospital. The weather was warm enough, so in the little park located right next to the institution, many children played, accompanied by their moms. The little ones were happy and enjoying everything was going on around them. As you watched them play and run from the swing to the slide or to the seesaw, you couldn’t realize they were children with various ailments. The playground was clad in their joy and happiness.
Later I would find out that this atmosphere is distinctive to the whole Hospital. When you enter a Healthcare Facility, you would expect that feeling of uneasiness to meet you, perhaps even of panic. I do not believe that there is anyone entering a Hospital, especially one dedicated to children, who does not experience such feelings. But at „Dr. Constantin Gorgos” Hospital, it wasn’t the case.
In the new building, built with Norwegian funds, tranquility reigns, conveyed by the fact that the patient who gets here has the assurance he will receive the care he needs. On the hallways you meet children and moms who socialize under the overseeing of the medical staff. The physicians in each ward are always among the sick. The Hospital rooms look impeccable, and the sick benefit of the latest therapies.
The Snoezelen Therapy or the Multisensory Therapy
One of these tremendous therapies is the Snoezelen Therapy or the Multisensory Therapy. Children with various mental disabilities are treated in the Snoezelen Room. It is also called „the dreams’ room” due to the fact that the therapies taking place in this specially equipped room include light, odours, textures, images and music.
In the case of the autistic children, for instance, this type of therapies stimulates them sensorially, helping them to develop certain reflexes. Caught in this playing, the teeny patients trigger by themselves the respective images or sounds. This way, they acquire the confidence that they can control their environment, and get to a high level of relaxation.
Snoezelen, the name given to this therapy, is the result of a rather hilarious combination of two Dutch terms. Actually, it is a combination between „to explore/to sniff out” and „to take a nap/to dream.” The therapy was invented in the Netherlands, in the year 1978, and was initially utilized only for persons with severe mental disabilities. It was successfully utilized also for the patients not being able to move.
Overtime, Snoezelen Therapy became more and more utilized. Today even the adults resort to it in order to get rid of the stress.
The Departments devoted to the children within „Dr. Constantin Gorgos” Psychiatric Hospital –Titan cover many silent ailments the little patients face. Depressions, food disorders, addiction on various substances, behavioral disorders, all these ailments are part of the quotidian reality and are encountered at more and more young ages.
“Dr. Constantin Gorgos” Psychiatric Hospital – Titan is one of the few Healthcare Facilities in the country possessed of the equipment necessary in treatment and caring for the patients in this category. Currently, the Hospital is very much on demand, not only by the patients in Bucharest. Many parents in the country come to Bucharest to treat their children at „Dr. Constantin Gorgos” Hospital.
