The National Health Insurance Company, the Ministry of Health and the medical institutions in the country lack a crisis management plan. Given that Moldova is dealing with budgetary instability for the 3rd year in a row, such a plan is an absolute must, thinks Expert-Grup analyst Tatiana Savva, who studied a report of the Court of Accounts on the health care system.
The expert told a press conference at IPN that medical institutions repeatedly had to deal with medicine shortages. In the first half of 2016, health care institutions received only 60% of the drugs they demanded and 12% arrived late. “For half a year, our hospitals faced an extraordinary crisis”, said the analyst.
Because budgetary instability affected the health care system as well, the Emergency Medicine Institute, the Republican Clinical Hospital and the Mother & Child’s Institute amassed debts of over 140 million lei to medicine suppliers. “Given that we have the same situation in 2016, most likely hospitals will face the same issues again”, said Tatiana Savva.
In her opinion, one of the big problems is that the burden on the mandatory health insurance fund has increased over the last two years because of the growing number of pensioners. As concerns hospitals, unsolved issues include the problem of asset management, poor access to medical services, the adjustment of medicine prices and planning the amount of necessary drugs and pharmaceutical products.
Another drawback is that the system doesn’t allow people to choose their service provider. The potential patient can get specialized treatment only in the institution to which he is sent by the family doctor or by the specialist.
As there is no entity managing the Ministry of Health property used by hospitals, the authorities cannot know how much capital investment is needed or how much equipment should be purchased. At the moment, such requests are sent individually by each hospital and there is no overall report in this regard.
The analysis was done within the project “The budgetary process in Moldova: monitoring transparency and promoting public control”, financed by Soros Foundation Moldova.
