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Carmen Uscatu: What a beautiful way to start the new year

Carmen Uscatu/LinkedIn

Jan 2, 2025, 12:29

Carmen Uscatu: What a beautiful way to start the new year

Carmen Uscatu, President and co-founder of Give Life, posted on LinkedIn:

“What a beautiful way to start the new year.

I took a walk, listened to the New Year’s Concert from Vienna, enjoyed a slice of good ‘cozonac’, and was pleased with the good score on Goodreads for my book, ‘The Year I Did Not Die.’ And the generous feedback from readers on Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.

‘The first part was a punch in the stomach, I even dreamed about you last night,’ a dear friend wrote to me this morning.

On LinkedIn, I see these words: ‘By the end, you’ll feel the need to hit at least one politician, and you’ll understand that to build a hospital, you have to go through one yourself.’

The tranquility has settled within me, it’s still there.
And curiosity is the perspective from which I view my days and, I hope, the years to come.
This is what I wish for you too.
Welcome, 2025!”

Carmen Uscatu is the President and co-founder of Dăruiește Viață / Give Life, one of the most well known NGOs in Romania and the NGO that has started and has implemented the initiative #WeBuildAHospital – building a children’s Hospital for scratch, exclusively from donations and sponsorships, a Hospital dedicated to ensuring multidisciplinary care to children with severe diseases, with a focus on cancer. She started volunteering in her free time before founding Dăruiește Viață, in 2012, with the purpose of drastically changing the way medical care is provided in Romania.

By the end of 2023, Dăruiește Viață had invested over 76M EUR in the public health system, implementing infrastructure projects, donating medical equipments, supporting patients and medical staff. The Hospital built in Bucharest is currently functional, treating children in the following specialties: oncology, neurosurgery, surgery, ICU and operating theatre with 5 operating rooms. In addition, the Hospital will include in the near future a transplant department and a radiotherapy department. Besides the Hospital, Dăruiește Viață has modernised and brought to nowadays standards oncology departments for children and adults in 8 hospitals across the country, has built 20 clean rooms thus tripling Romania’s transplant capacity, has built and equipped two laboratories for in-depth diagnosis of leukemia, has built two modular ICU hospitals during the pandemic and has donated over 17 tons of PPE. The Hospital project continues with the NGO planning to develop the project into the first pediatric medical campus in Romania.