Ilona, a fantastic woman who is the driving force behind this difficult region, is our new coordinator. After more than twenty years in the health sector, she has decided to build communities, communities where disadvantaged and disadvantaged people can find a place. His whole life has been about helping people, and over the decades he has created many, many things that all serve that purpose. Now, as the coordinator of SIVSN, she looks after and helps the health of the people who come to her. She uses her professional knowledge, her organisational skills and her dedication to help where there are serious problems with health awareness, but also with access to a doctor.

“I started my career at the Matieskalka Hospital, where I spent more than 20 years among patients. In between and afterwards, I was looking for ways to organise programmes and find a suitable place where we could offer support to a much wider audience. I would like to help people who are living in extreme poverty and disadvantage, but basically anyone who needs not only health but social support. I have been involved in the planning and implementation of several projects of the order of EUR 100 million as chairman of the North Great Plain Telecentres Region. I was an active participant in the tenders of the Ministry of Rural Development, the Government Committee for Information Technology and the State Secretariat for Information Technology for the establishment of telecentres and e-Hungary points. Where I have acted as a mentor, monitor, expert and site inspector. I am currently also volunteering to help develop and maintain the community points. As the hostess of the telecentre in Ópályi, I have often had to find the funds needed to run the centre from scratch, so I have learned to allocate the resources available to me efficiently and optimally. As a member of the Friends of Ópályi, I have been involved in the organisation of many small and large cultural and community events over the last 25 years, during which I have learned the steps of event management. I learned how to involve people in the programmes,” says Ilona, who knows that people in this region need social support, community and self-esteem perhaps more than anything else. “I’m involved in and have proposed a lot of initiatives where these people can really add value, get recognition and feel useful. Our main base, however, is the Telehaus, where we have, for example, a soup kitchen, where we serve a hot lunch to 230 people a day. We have the potential to make public work a truly value-creating and useful way for people to spend their time. We have a school where children in groups of 25 can learn gypsy music, dance and language preservation. A priority programme is to promote employment for disadvantaged people. This programme is carried out in the framework of public work. I have to be honest, when I first started, after one day I said, I can’t do this. I called the programme officer and he said, Ilona, wait three days. And she was right! The kind words, the attention, the willingness to do something for them has changed them, and when they say: ‘Auntie Ica has given me back my self-respect, my heart is overflowing’, continues our new coordinator, who has not completely separated from the health sector after her work in the hospital. “15 years ago, I founded the Pulse Foundation with the help of the then MP for the region at my former hospital, of which I later became a trustee. It became a matter of the heart to improve the conditions of the patients in our hospital. Our equipment purchases and renovations are ongoing. It’s fantastic to see how much we can work together. I can safely say that perhaps the people who help and give the most are those who have very little and are themselves very needy. But the health situation in our region is serious, for all social groups living in deprived areas. For example, among the Roma population, there are hardly any people over over 65, which shows not only the difficulty of accessing care but also, unfortunately, the lack of health awareness. I have very little time, but that is why the SIVSN coordinator programme has appealed to me so deeply. It is a necessity. We have already organised a screening, measuring high blood pressure and blood sugar levels among the participants. Another difficulty here is that we do not know where to refer patients. The waiting lists, specialist examinations and general practitioners in this region are all very difficult. We are here to give them all the help we can with our professional knowledge, but this is already a big thing for them,” Ilona added.