Maybe little Moritz won’t wash his hands at all that day. It doesn’t often happen in his everyday life as a child that he gives Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) a high five. Moritz is beaming from ear to ear. In the house for children on Isoldenstrasse, he and his kindergarten friends painted pictures for the clinic’s inauguration. How they imagine the clinic, what they want from it. Moritz painted a large, orange tiger. The “Miracle Tiger” is the mascot of the Munich Schwabing Children’s Hospital Foundation. His name as a lettering shows the way to the clinic. To the emergency room.
At the opening of the Schwabing Women’s and Children’s Clinic on Tuesday, Reiter high-fived many children. He’s clearly enjoying it. Well, he is an experienced grandfather and has five grandchildren. He talks to the little guests, asks them this and that. And gives another high five.
It doesn’t often happen that three children suddenly walk into the Munich Clinic (Mük) Schwabing, knock on the management office and bring 160 euros. The trio’s nicknames are Tönchen, Helenchen and Freed. They collected money for the new building at the flea market at Münchner Freiheit. Because they want all sick children to get well again quickly.
160 euros. Kindly meant, a lot of money for the children. And yet just a tiny drop in the ocean. The city and the Free State have invested 143 million euros in the new building, which is everything: a clinic with short distances and state-of-the-art pediatric medicine under one roof – with an emergency center, surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, neonatology and pediatric oncology.
Not exactly cheap. But “very well invested money for our children” as Dieter Reiter and the Bavarian Health Minister Judith Gerlach (CSU) say. Sticking to the municipal clinics is the “right decision,” emphasizes Reiter, who is also chairman of the supervisory board of the Munich Clinic. Now, according to Gerlach, the new clinic just needs to become a “place of trust” where families are in good hands, “medically and humanely.”
Ultra-modern medicine, many excellences – the new house with its 150 beds will be a medical “milestone”. Not only Mük managing director Götz Brodermann and his commercial colleague, Tim Guderjahn, are absolutely convinced of this, but also the entire team of doctors. The interiors were lovingly designed by the Munich Schwabing Children’s Hospital Foundation. The first departments will move into the new building next Wednesday. The first baby could be born in the women’s clinic in the afternoon.
All that remains are good wishes. Children, patients and hospital employees wrote them on pieces of paper that were attached to balloons. Ben, a pediatric oncology patient, wishes all children to never give up, “no matter how hard it is.” Then his balloon flies into the gray sky with many others.
By the way, a wish balloon later lands on a construction site near Rosenheim. Found by a young man whose brother is a trainee in Mük.