PiS: medical fields are being liquidated, the minister talks about a “zero limit”. What is it about?

During the session of the Sejm on October 10, 2024, Minister of Health Izabela Leszczyna responded to the allegations of the liquidation of medical fields made by one of the PiS MPs, and her response sparked a discussion on social media.

It started with Marek Matuszewski from PiS appearing in the Sejm: “We all know perfectly well that there are not many doctors, there are huge queues in medical clinics. And what did the Law and Justice government do? The Law and Justice government caused were created at academies. What happened in the new… We have a minister here [zdrowia]he will answer us soon. In Nowy Sącz, in Nowy Targ, the medical field at the academy is being liquidated. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the answer given to these sick people who are waiting one or two years for surgery. The idea is to perform these operations as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the minister's subordinate services cause these fields of study to be closed down. This is a scandal!” he spoke. And he ended with a rhetorical question: “How can you look sick people in the face?”

Then the Minister of Health came to the podium and replied: “The MP has misled this high chamber. The government is not eliminating any medical fields. The government of the October 15 coalition, Mr. as best as possible. We don't want the doctor to stand next to the patient and be unprepared for this. And now: why [poseł Matuszewski] misleading? We have not closed down any medical field. First of all, it is the Polish Accreditation Committee… (…) It is an accreditation committee, not the Minister of Health. The accreditation committee decides whether the university is prepared to educate students.” Then she added:

“If the university meets the requirements of the Polish Accreditation Committee within a year, it will receive a quota for students. If you want to be treated by a whisperer, you can do it, but Poles cannot,” the Minister of Health concluded her speech.

Leszczyna's statement that the government was not eliminating medical courses but introducing zero limits was immediately cut out from the entire statement and published online with mocking comments.

Opposition MPs posted several entries on this subject. PiS MP Radosław Fogiel added a Winnie the Pooh meme to the quote, Sebastian Kaleta from Sovereign Poland added a clown emoticon, and yet another PiS representative Paweł Jabłoński wrote: “There is a shortage of doctors? Well, we are not eliminating medical faculties – we simply gave universities a ZERO age limit and no they can accept any student. And what do you mean? Minister of Health Izabela Leszczyna” (original spelling of all entries).

Anonymous Internet users also joked about this sentence of the Minister of Health. “Medical fields – we are not eliminating them, we have only granted ZERO limit. Perfect”; “As if by magic, the closing of medical faculties turned into zero student admission limits. Is it possible? It's possible! In a smiling Poland, everything is possible”; “The government is not eliminating it! The government is simply introducing zero limits,” wrote users of website X.

We would like to remind you which controversial medical fields are concerned and why granting them zero admission limits is different from eliminating such fields.

Let us recall what medical fields we are talking about. In November 2021, the Sejm adopted a draft bill submitted by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education and Science, which assumed that it would be possible to open medical fields outside academic universities – at academies of applied sciences and vocational universities. Then, in July 2023, further changes, pushed by the then minister Przemysław Czarnek, were adopted: from that moment on, the interested academy or university no longer even had to have a scientific category in the discipline of medical or health sciences to open a medical field. This opened the doors even wider to those non-medical universities that wanted to educate doctors.

The academic and medical community strongly opposed such lowering of requirements. In its critical position, the Supreme Medical Council emphasized that “when taking action to counteract staff shortages in health care, in particular among doctors, this cannot be prioritized over ensuring the appropriate quality of education.” According to the medical self-government, such a rapid increase in the number of medical faculties was supposed to “result in a decrease in the quality of doctors' education and their preparation to perform this profession, a kind of 'felcherization' of the medical profession.”

READ MORE: Doctors from non-medical universities? The Ministry wants it, but the medical self-government is afraid about the level of knowledge and skills

However, Minister Przemysław Czarnek was not concerned about such voices and gave consent to opening medical faculties to other interested non-medical universities. In 2022-2023, as many as 17 universities received permission to establish medical studies.

However, the Polish Accreditation Committee (PKA) – an agency consisting of experts assessing the quality of academic education – did not grant accreditation to 11 of them in 2023, assessing that they did not meet the conditions for conducting medical courses. “Gazeta Wyborcza” yes she then described the content of some of the PAC's opinions: “Instead of classes in the laboratory [uczelnie] they proposed a slide show. They also proposed teachers without qualifications to teach the subjects they were supposed to teach. The Polish Accreditation Committee criticized them for the lack of teaching rooms, hospital facilities and autopsy rooms. Students were supposed to learn (and learn) anatomy only from atlases and phantoms.” However, the PKA opinions are not binding on the Minister of Education, so Przemysław Czarnek ignored them.

Two universities ultimately withdrew from the idea of ​​opening medicine, so at the beginning of October 2023, unaccredited medical courses began to operate at nine universities. These were:

Branch of the Medical University of Silesia in Bielsko-Biała, Bydgoszcz University of Technology, WSB University in Dąbrowa Górnicza, University of Kalisz, Social Academy of Sciences in Łódź, Academy of Applied Sciences in Nowy Targ, Academy of Applied Sciences. Prince Mieszko I in Poznań, University of Siedlce, Tarnów University.

READ MORE IN KONKRET24: “Are they eliminating medical faculties”? What's the problem with nine universities?

After the change of government in December 2023, the new management of the ministries of health and science promised to address the problem of medical fields without accreditation. The Polish Accreditation Committee was commissioned to audit nine existing fields of study and two that were to start education in the 2024/2025 academic year (Olsztyńska Szkoła Wyższa – branch in Cieszyn and the Academy of Applied Sciences in Nowy Sącz).

The audit was supposed to end in mid-June, but we finally got the results in early September. Of the eleven audited universities, only the WSB Academy in Dąbrowa Górnicza received a fully positive assessment. A branch of the Medical University of Silesia in Bielsko-Biała, the University of Kalisz and the Wrocław University of Science and Technology received conditional evaluation for a period of one or two years.

However, the PKA negatively assessed the academies of applied sciences in Nowy Sącz and Nowy Targ, the Poznań Medical Academy of Applied Sciences (the list includes the name Prince Mieszko I Academy of Applied Sciences in Poznań, the name was changed in November 2023 – ed.) and the Social Academy of Sciences in Łódź. “Significant shortcomings” were found in the case of the University of Siedlce, although a final assessment has not yet been issued there.

According to May 2024 announcement the audit results were reflected in regulation of the Minister of Health regarding the admission limit for studies in medicine and dentistry of September 26, 2024. Izabela Leszczyna allowed students to be recruited for the first year of medicine at non-medical universities only in Bielsko-Biała, Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kalisz and Wrocław (of course, other medical universities, such as the Medical University of Warsaw, received limits already in first version of the regulation in July 2024). All other universities without PKA accreditation received a zero admission limit for the first year, which Minister Leszczyna spoke about from the parliamentary podium and which some opposition MPs joked about.

“Granting a zero limit” instead of eliminating a field of study, although it may seem to be a specific construction, has different effects than closing controversial fields of study.

Izabela Leszczyna already mentioned the first argument for granting zero limits instead of closing medical fields in her parliamentary speech. However, this fragment was cut out from the recordings that PiS politicians and other Internet users published on social media. The Minister of Health said: “If the university meets the requirements of the Polish Accreditation Committee within a year, it will receive a quota for students.”

Therefore, granting a zero admission limit means that the field of study was not liquidated and continues to exist, but could not admit new students for the 2024/2025 academic year. The university creating it was therefore given time to correct the errors indicated in the opinions of the State Accreditation Committee and apply for accreditation again. If the committee's experts accept the new conditions, the Minister of Health announced that she will grant a limit on the recruitment of medical students for the 2025/2026 academic year.

There is another fundamental difference between closing a direction and granting a zero limit. As the Minister of Health, Adam Niedzielski, agreed to recruitment at non-accredited universities in 2023, students are currently studying there and started their second year of study at the beginning of October 2024. Blocking recruitment for the first year, but not liquidating these fields, means that they can continue their education. According to act Law on Higher Education and Science, if their fields were abolished, they would only be able to finish the semester.

Therefore, already in February 2024, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Dariusz Wieczorek, announced that the government does not intend to close courses without accreditation, because it will act in such a way “that students suffer as little as possible.” He added, however, that if such liquidation ultimately took place, students would be able to continue their studies at public universities. Professor Marcin Gruchała, rector of the Medical University of Gdańsk and chairman of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Medical Universities, declared that the universities associated in it are able to admit students from possibly liquidated fields.

At the moment, however, representatives of the ministries of health and science do not announce the liquidation of fields of study that have not received a positive opinion of the Polish Accreditation Committee. And granting zero recruitment limits, although ridiculed by some PiS and Sovereign Poland politicians, is not synonymous with liquidation, because it causes various consequences for both the universities concerned and the students.