Doctor Dumitru Noroc, senior university professor, MP in the first Parliament, says that the country’s healthcare system is in shambles. We have a feeble and desperate population, which is a pain not only to the population, but to the Government as well. Now, in a pre-election year, the authorities have decided to do something about healthcare, so they prepare teams for dispatch to districts, to villages, that is to send the doctor into the village, to the citizen. A practice inherited from the Soviet Union, the doctor says.
“We have seen these methods long ago, those of us who have worked during Soviet times, when they gathered brigades and sent them into villages to treat sick people. Yet the work stayed the same, because you need good conditions to treat an illness, and citizens who want to treat themselves take good care of their health,” mentioned Dumitru Noroc in an interview for Radio Free Europe, quoted by IPN.
According to the doctor, these routine examinations are for healthy people. Anyone would be happy for the doctor to visit them in their home, but the question is: “What does the doctor bring?” “In other words, the doctor comes with a team of specialists from the city, where they are scarce as well, (…), into the village, without any possibility to perform tests, since they lack quality equipment; they measure blood pressure, pulse, give the ailing person a piece of advice and a series of referrals – to go to a district hospital or to republican centers,” the professor noted, mentioning that the work done by these teams could be done by a medical nurse or a family physician.
Dumitru Noroc considers that, for proper reforms, one must begin with re-organizing stationary facilities, paying attention to the rational use of beds. Another aspect concerns pharmacies and medications. “All pharmacies are private-owned. The state has sort of left it alone, we don’t have pharmaceutical points in villages, we don’t have state pharmacies that would cover the costs for medication provisions. If we had these pharmaceutical points within the system, maintenance and community service would be born by the hospital, or the family physician center, and wouldn’t be factored into the cost; private-owned facilities factor these in.” The doctor adds that X-ray medical buses should be procured for villages, to enable early diagnoses of certain diseases.
