The Casa de Saúde Nossa Senhora de Fátima, of the Sisters Hospitallers and founded in February 1972, celebrates its 50th anniversary providing social and health services in the municipality of Pirituba, in Brazil.
Today, we remember with affection the group of Sisters Hospitallers who formed the first community and were pioneers of this great work: Sisters Alice de Jesus Fernandes, Amélia de Jesus Martins (transferred from the Casa de Saúde de Nossa Senhora do Caminho), Maria Clara Escada, Conceição Esteves Martins and Maria Isilda Gomes, who arrived from Portugal in January 1972. In October of that same year, Sister Cecília da Encarnação Rocha arrived.
The goal of the Congregation has always been to care for people with mental illness by combining science and charity. Hence the concern to select good professionals who, associated with the charisma of hospitality and imbued with its values, make a difference in patient care.
The first agreements by the institution were with the Municipal Public Server Hospital, which began treating the first 19 patients on March 16, and the Mental Health Coordination, which did the same with the first 30 patients on April 8. The extension of this agreement with the CSM allowed us to participate in the process of dismantling Juquery, which at that time housed some 15,000 patients. We received 100 of these patients in just two days, on December 27 and 28, 1973. It was not an easy task: care had to be individualized, diagnosed and dignity restored to those who had lost it due to the disease and the long period of hospitalization. We received them as our Christmas present that year, as we learned to live what Jesus says in Matthew 25:40: “Whenever you did it to the least of my brothers, you did it to me.” And that Saint Benedict Menni, our founder, always taught us to see in the sick the “living image of Jesus”.
Mental Health Care
The health center has always aimed to care for patients whose illness was acute, exacerbated or chronic, and it was necessary to redouble the efforts of the entire medical and technical team in their rehabilitation and social reintegration.
This experience confirmed us in the certainty that, as Sisters Hospitallers, we have been called with a special vocation (charisma) and sent to make a difference in the lives of these sick people. That is our mission!
We look to the future with HOPE, believing in the current charism and in the need for the mission. Today, with the opening to new realities such as chemical dependency, elderly people with dementia and alternative forms of treatment: day hospital, CAPS, therapeutic residences…, which the Congregation already has in the southern area of São Paulo, as well as the Nossa Senhora de Fátima Integrated Health Center, through which more than 68,000 patients have passed.
We currently have a capacity of 190 beds, with 105 patients admitted and the rest under negotiation. In addition, the center has 95 collaborators and three sisters, as well as nine out-of-hospital projects in collaboration with the São Paulo City Council, in which 278 professionals work.
Celebrating 50 years is affirming that we value the path traveled and that we place ourselves before God’s will for the future.
