Hospital reform prepared by the Ministry of Health. There are to be financial packages and repair plans

The hospital reform project is ready and the Ministry of Health wants to present it within two weeks on a permanent committee of the Council of Ministers – Deputy Minister of Health Jerzy Szafranowicz said on Tuesday in the Sejm. – In addition to aid and financial packages, there are also repair plans – announced the deputy head of the health department.

In the opinion of Jerzy Szafranowicz, the project solves the problem of poviat hospitals in an interesting way. He said that until now there was a tendency to pay off debts and this was not associated with obligations for hospitals. – In addition to aid and financial packages, there are also repair plans – announced Deputy Minister of Health.

Szafranowicz gave an example of hospitals in Lesko, Ustrzyki and Sanok, 20-25 km away from each other. He said that their managers, directors and local governments agreed and wrote a recovery plan, which assumes connecting these hospitals in Konglomerate. Szafranowicz pointed out that each of these hospitals decided to close a ward to another hospital so as not to compete with each other.

A small delivery room can not always be defended

As the deputy minister of health emphasized, it is not representatives of the Ministry of Health or the National Health Fund that decide to close the hospital department, but the founding body.

– No decision on our part was made to close the branches and such decisions will be made. These will be arbitrary decisions of local governments – said Szafranowicz.

At the same time, he noted that it is impossible to defend the obstetric department, where about 200 births take place annually, when another obstetric department operates 10-15 km away. He emphasized that it was a matter of patient safety. Szafranowicz noticed that in such a situation a doctor and a midwife working in the duty system take two or three births a month, which does not guarantee a reliable work.

Repair plans and redemption

In the second half of May the Minister of Health Izabela Leszczyna She said that there would be a financial mechanism in the hospital reform project, which depended the hospital directors to support the indebted institutions entering the repair program by Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK).

– If the hospital after the implementation of the recovery program begins to balance and ceases to have an annual loss, then one tenth debt will be discontinued each year – Leszczyna explained. She added that the current debt of hospitals is about PLN 27 billion.

It will be the fourth proposal of hospital reform prepared by the Ministry of Health. In April, the third version of the project was in the schedule of the work of the Council of Ministers, but the government did not accept the project. The local government side of the Government and Local Government Committee then pointed out that the project did not have financial tools that directly support hospital restructuring.

Poviat hospitals usually lead an internal one, general surgery, cardiology, orthopedics, pediatrics, gynecology and obstetrics. Every year, about seven million people use them.