We have trained unemployed women from the villages in a three-month course at the nursing school in Chisinau in caring for the elderly and sick and basic medical knowledge. With incredible dedication, our community nurses now look after the elderly and sick in the villages, care for and wash them, give medication and apply bandages, clean the houses, fetch water from the village well and are often the only point of contact for them. Abandoned children whose parents work abroad are cared for by the community nurses. They bring the children into contact with our social workers, who then take care of all their social needs. The aim of this model project is to anchor this social service in the Moldovan healthcare system in the long term so that all elderly, sick and abandoned people in the villages can make use of such help in the future.
Community care in the villages
Together with the Robert Bosch Stiftung, we launched this pilot project in Moldova in 2010 and are currently working on its sustainable implementation in the Moldovan health and social services. 13 outreach nurses and 3 project coordinators from 13 remote villages in the Republic of Moldova have been trained to care for old, sick and often completely neglected people and neglected children. There are many bedridden and lonely old people in the villages, who languish forgotten in unbelievable filth and catastrophic conditions in their homes, without running water or heating. Many of them are chronically ill. They have no family or relatives left, as most of their relatives have left the country to find work abroad.
