SMURD
The SMURD (short for rum. : Serviciul Mobil de Urgenta Reanimare şi Descarcerare , Translator .: Mobile service for emergencies, resuscitation and recovery ) is an emergency medical services in Romania . It was founded in 1990 in Târgu Mureș on the initiative of the Palestinian doctor Raed Arafat , who lives in Romania , as the state rescue service was in a catastrophic state shortly after the Romanian revolution of 1989. In the meantime, a nationwide emergency doctor service has emerged from this private project with foreign help , which is legally assigned to the state military fire brigade and can be reached in conjunction with the police and fire brigade on the emergency number 112.
In January 2012, the long-time head of the SMURD rescue service, Raed Arafat, resigned from his post after a publicly televised dispute with President Traian Băsescu over a market economy reform of the health system, which led to protests against the government across the country. A week later, however, the government under Prime Minister Emil Boc rowed back and reappointed him as Undersecretary for Rescue Services in the Ministry of Health.
history
Raed Arafat, a Palestinian from Nablus in the West Bank , immigrated to Romania in 1981 at the age of 16 and was able to study medicine there. After completing his training, he found a job as a doctor in the Transylvanian city of Târgu Mureş, where he witnessed the fall of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime in December 1989 and the violent ethnic riots in March 1990. Both events showed that the emergency services of the state hospitals were in a catastrophic state. He therefore decided in September 1990 to set up his own improvised rescue service. Many of his medical colleagues from the Hospital Clinicii de Anestezie Terapie Intensivă as well as employees of the state rescue service Serviciul de Ambulanță support him and formed the first emergency doctor unit. In 1991, this new local rescue service received a modern rescue vehicle as a donation from Germany. Up to this point in time, all those involved worked voluntarily and on a voluntary basis. With the new device, however, a professionalization became necessary and from October of this year a cooperation with the brigade of the military fire brigade of the Mureș County began .
In 1992 the ambulance service received additional vehicles and medical equipment as donations from the Norwegian Red Cross , the Royal Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Strathclyde Fire Brigade in Glasgow . In addition to the emergency medical service, a mobile unit for rescue and civil protection in the event of chemical accidents could now be set up. In 1993, the now SMURD called emergency services expanded for the first time and built a branch in western Romania Oradea / Oradea and in südsiebenbürgischen Sibiu on. With the help of additional donations from England and the United States , the service was expanded in the following year. This was followed by branches in Cluj-Napoca , Arad , Timișoara , Craiova , Bucharest and Iași . On July 31, 1994, the headquarters of the SMURD was opened in the courtyard of the Mureș District Hospital in Târgu Mureș.
In 1996 the Parliament passed Law No. 121 for the Military Fire Brigade Corps, which obliged them to provide emergency medical services in every district of Romania . This created a legal basis to integrate the privately founded SMURD, which was previously only informally connected with the military fire brigade, organizationally and financially into the state rescue service. In 1997, with help from France, a 25-person disaster team from SMURD was set up, which was equipped with pagers that were modern at the time . At that time there was no functioning mobile phone network in Romania, the first GSM network was started in April 1997 by the company Connex (now Vodafone România ), but at that time it had not yet been expanded nationwide.
In 1998, the Mureș military fire brigade, together with the SMURD, received the first lifeboat to be able to rescue victims and drowning people from the Mieresch River . In July of that year a large donation campaign was started in Mureș County, which raised DM 183,000 by December . A special rescue vehicle from the Miesen company from Bonn was acquired, at that time the most modern in all of Romania. In 1999 the first rescue helicopter was put into operation, a French Alouette III .
In 2001 the emergency call system in Romania was standardized and switched to the European emergency number 112. Since then, the SMURD can also be called under this number. In the following years the SMURD expanded further, first aid centers were now also set up in medium-sized and smaller towns, for example in Ibăneşti , Sovata and Dumbrăveni / Elisabethstadt. In 2011, the fourth SMURD rescue helicopter in the country was put into operation in Timişoara.
In January 2012, there were political disputes around the SMURD rescue service. In the wake of the austerity measures as a result of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area , which put the financially troubled Romania further into distress and since then has been dependent on loans from the EU and the International Monetary Fund , President Traian Băsescu proposed a reform of the state health system. Among other things, the SMURD rescue service, which was previously financed through donations and state subsidies, was to be privatized. Raed Arafat, founder and head of the organization, who had meanwhile also become State Secretary in the Ministry of Health, vehemently rejected this proposal. He therefore resigned from office in protest. This in turn triggered a wave of popular protest, as Arafat was very popular as a non-partisan career changer. In addition, the SMURD was considered reliable. Der Spiegel even wrote on January 16, 2012: “ As the only area of the otherwise ailing Romanian health care system, Arafat's work is considered exemplary. That is why even the IMF and the EU had expressly advised against reforming the SMURD. “Demonstrations in Bucharest, Timișoara, Brașov, Hermannstadt and numerous other cities followed. Health Minister László Ritli from the Hungarian UDMR party , the smaller coalition partner in the government, also sided with Arafat. Finally, on January 18, Prime Minister Emil Boc revoked Arafat's resignation and reappointed him as Undersecretary of Emergency Services in the Ministry of Health. The free-market restructuring of the rescue system has thus been put on hold for the time being.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung : State and also private emergency service? Under-Secretary of State Raed Arafat resigned , January 12, 2012
- ^ ADZ: Protests on the Great Ring , January 16, 2012
- ^ ADZ: Raed Arafat returns to the Ministry of Health , January 18, 2012
- ↑ tribuna.ro: 15 ani de SMURD - SMURD Sibiu a împlinit 15 ani de activitate , January 12, 2009
- ↑ tribuna.ro: În prima lună de funcţionare - Peste 70 de intervenţii pentru SMURD Dumbrăveni , September 14, 2008
- ^ ADZ: Rescue helicopter for Western Romania , November 24, 2011
- ↑ Der Standard : The folk hero who didn't want to be - doctor Raed Arafat triggers a wave of protests in Romania , January 19, 2012
- ↑ Der Spiegel: Demos and outbreaks of violence - Romania rebels against the austerity dictate , January 16, 2012
- ^ ADZ: Romania rebels against the austerity dictate , January 16, 2012