Daniel Stanciu commutes long hours every day to save children’s lives at the Calarasi County Hospital in Eastern Romania. Daniel is a pediatric surgeon. He is Roma and the primary health practitioner in his own family.
Salija Ljatif-Petrushovska heads the Skopje Gerontology and Palliative Care Medical Center. Saluja is Roma, too. She grew up in Shuto Orizari, a large Roma-led municipality in North Macedonia. In 2012, she finished her clinical research with the guidance of a scholarship for Roma medical students provided using the Roma Education Fund.
Many reports display that Roma encounters a range of demanding situations within the medical system, from the negligence of the health government and a shortage of prevention programs to language limitations and racist stigma. These challenges have contributed to poorer fitness results in Roma communities, wherein low life expectancy, excessive fees of persistent illnesses, and infant mortality are enduring troubles.
Our Roma Health Scholarships Program is looking to counter these trends with the aid of helping Roma teenagers emerge as scientific experts, and hence enhance get right of entry to health take care of contributors in their groups. Since 2008, this system has funded over 530 Roma from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia. We have witnessed that terrible stereotypes against Roma within the health care machine are more likely to lower when public hospitals have extra Roma clinical professionals.
The application also connects students with mentors, mostly professors at medical universities, trains their advocacy abilities on public fitness troubles, and encourages them to develop tasks in nearby Roma communities, like facts sessions on preventive fitness care and workshops on dental hygiene and breast cancers with kids and girls. In Serbia, a group of students even created a vaccination timetable calendar in Romanes—the language shared using Roma communities across Europe.
Today, we’ve over 250 program alumni, all Roma health specialists, who, like Daniel and Salija, contribute to enhancing access to fitness care and providing medical services to Roma people in Europe. National governments have mentioned the incredible impact of our scholarship scheme on the general public health zone and Roma groups. It is our hope they’ll devote themselves to enroll in our efforts in supporting the program. The Roma Education Fund is a grantee of the Open Society Foundations. The Roma Education Fund released the Roma Health Scholarship Program in 2008 and has supported over 500 Roma clinical students in the past ten years in North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria.
