During the period in office of the former GERB government, municipal hospitals were the biggest victims of government policy in the field of healthcare. Systematically tortured through burdensome administrative procedures and underfinanced, many of them are now in debt and left without staff. Public and private healthcare have been concentrated in large cities and small hospitals were left with next to nothing, resulting in at least a dozen of them having to be closed.
As Calculated by the National Association of Municipalities, about 1.4 million Bulgarians travel over 50 or even over 70 kilometres to receive care at the nearest regional hospital. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and pensioners have even refused to do so because they have no means to afford this „luxury“. Therefore, over 50,000 prescribed checks and medical examinations by a specialist remained unused in 2013, according to the Health Insurance Fund.
It should be noted that, unlike its predecessors, the current head of the healthcare ministry did not turn a blind eye to the problem.
At the end of last year special crisis fund was created to support with up to 250,000 levs per year
the municipal clinics that are at risk of bankruptcy. On this occasion, the municipalities offered additional funding to hospitals that serve people in remote and inaccessible areas. These settlements cover the conditions at least 40% of the settlements in the municipality to be farther than 40 km from the district hospital and the proportion of the adult population and unemployment rate to be above the national average levels. So far, the ministry of healthcare has promised that it will distribute 6 million levs between 50 hospitals as some of the hospitals that are certain to get some of the money are those in Veliki Preslav, Omurtag, Popovo, Tutrakan, Isperih, Kubrat and Novi Pazar, most of which lie in northeastern Bulgaria
„We will use the additional 120,000 levs for payment of arrears,“ admitted the director of the hospital in Omurtag Dr. Pavlina Pavlova. Perhaps her colleagues will do the same.
It is clear that the one-time cash injection will solve the most pressing problems, but debt will continue to pile up. So the only possibility of resurrecting the municipal healthcare can come from preparing a National Healthcare Map. Recently become available and the criteria by which it will be written to key hospital documents. On one hand, the map will have to give a „snapshot“ of the current situation with the medical care in a given area, and in particular – more information on the number and types of hospitals, physicians in specialties, dentists, hospital beds types and levels of competence. At the same time, this will be made in a strange mix of authoritarian-liberal methods that can lead to even greater chaos in the system. For the development of regional maps Minister of Health will appoint committees, but they will have mainly advisory functions. The analysis should be sufficient to ensure full access to the hospitals for the population of the various areas.
The BANKER
