“No hospital is perfect, but it is false and unjust” to spread the idea that at the Bambino Gesu paediatric hospital there are “serious health hazards” to patients, said Greg Burke. Responding to a case against this property of the Holy See in Rome, the Director of the Press Office assured that the hospital has “an exceptional level of care.”
In a statement on July 3, 2017, reported by L’Osservatore Romano the following day, Greg Burke reacted to the accusations of inefficiency presumably launched by the “Associated Press” U.S. agency, through a survey. The Bambino Gesu, he stressed, “ is a hospital of which the Church is proud given the exceptional care it furnishes to children and tens of thousands of families are witnesses of this every year, many of which are in need of being financially assisted.”
Recalling “claims” made some three years ago, the Vatican’s spokesman noted that the Holy See “reacted with speed and determination to study the problems seriously.” And the survey made it possible to reveal “an exceptional level of care and the fact that the accusations were unfounded.”
The only “critical note,” he added, “concerned the insufficient space in the intensive therapy units,” a problem of which “the hospital’s functionaries are aware” and are trying to resolve.
Greg Burke concluded saying that “the Church sees medical assistance as a mission and receives favourably all efforts to contribute to improve care in its hospitals, including the particulars of practices that could be inferior to its standards.”
Address Problems in a Serious Way
The Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin himself intervened on this subject in an aside from the presentation of the Hospital’s 2016 report: “the reference is to episodes . . . in the past,” in which an effort has been made at all costs to identify and address” the problems “seeking to resolve them,” he said. “No hospital is perfect, but certain things are clearly without foundation,” he said.
“There are always problems,” added the Vatican’s “number 2”, quoted by the Italian Catholic agency SIR. “I don’t want to say that the Bambino Gesus is absolute perfection, but there is the will to address” the problems “ in a serious and transparent manner,” he noted.
In his intervention, Cardinal Parolin greeted “the results obtained by the current leadership of the Bambino Gesu,” inviting them “to continue on the same path of rigor and transparency.”
