Can you help ease plight of patients? (From Gazette Series)

Can you help ease plight of patients?

THE North Nibley Romania Team is seeking builders and other skilled workers to help with their work at an impoverished psychiatric hospital this summer.

A survey team of four volunteers, chairman Peter Tolson and his wife Vanessa, treasurer of the charity, along with Matthew Bigwood and Gazette photographer John Anyon spent the week prioritising what tasks would be carried out during the two-week visit in the summer by a team of workers.

The kitchen will be the focus of the efforts, with plans to retile the walls of the huge room and install a suspended ceiling, but all this depends on whether volunteer helpers can be found.

The hospital is home to 150 long-term patients suffering from schizophrenia, Alzheimer's Disease, depression and learning difficulties. Medical care is limited due to the small amount of funding the establishment receives. During the trip the charity bought bottles of disinfectant, as well as shampoo and other hygiene products for the patients.

Staff have come to rely on charities to provide such essentials, diverting money to more pressing needs such as medication.

The hospital is situated in the village of Mina 1 Mai, a former coal mining community in central Romania. The coal mine closed in the 1960s and the office building was pressed into use as a psychiatric hospital.

It receives barely sufficient government funding to operate. At the beginning of the year there was an outcry in the local media when it was discovered the hospital had been without heating for a week in January, the coldest month of the year when temperatures can fall to -20c in the daytime.

The charity has achieved much during the past decade, not least the purchase of a new industrial washing machine for the hospital to replace the old and inefficient one that staff had been forced to use.

Generous donations and hard work by the charity's volunteers have secured the £10,000 needed for the new machine.

Anyone willing to give up two weeks to help with this year's project should contact the charity via their website, www.nnrt.co.uk