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Romania spends less on healthcare than any other country in the European Union, and because of the worst recession on record, it is planning to spend even less. This chronic underfunding and a brain-drain of medical staff could be putting patients at risk.

In a poor village in southern Romania, the Grigore family is harvesting onions. For their only son, poverty may have been a death sentence.

Constantin Grigore chokes up when he talks about his nine-year-old son. Cristian broke his arm in May and was taken to the hospital in the nearest town, Slatina.

But four days later, he was dead, apparently of a severe infection he had caught there. The picture of a little boy with big dark eyes now hangs on the outside wall of the family's ramshackle mud-brick house.

Cristian's father said the doctors simply ignored his son. The family had to buy painkillers with their own money. Then they gave the doctor US$6, all they could afford. "If I had more money he would have returned home," Mr Grigore said. "It would have saved his life."

This little boy's death shows just how sick Romania's healthcare system is. The management of the hospital and the doctors who treated Cristian Grigore were sacked.

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