Health Ministry launches national clinical protocols to combat corruption

The Ministry of Health will hand over the first 22 of the 50 national clinical protocols that must be worked out until this yearend to medical institutions on November 20. According to Health Minister Larisa Catrinici, the national clinical protocols represent diagnosis and treatment standards formulated with the aim of fighting corruption in the healthcare system and in the doctor-patient relations, Info-Prim Neo reports. The national clinical protocols form part of the Millennium Challenge Corporation Threshold Country Program. “The national clinical protocols will insure equity when addressing tactics and conduct-related problems in the medical assistance system,” Larisa Catrinici said at the meeting of the working group for monitoring the implementation of the Threshold Country Program. “The patient diagnosed with a certain disease will know what steps the doctor should take in the treatment process and all the patients suffering from the same disease will be treated non-discriminatorily. The given standards will not allow the doctors to take inappropriate approaches in the relations with the patients,” the minister explained. Though the protocols are launched and implemented with delay, representatives of the civil society that monitored the process say that they are of a high quality and will be efficient after put into practice. “They should have been applied several months ago, but the formulation and implementation process was extended after the Health Ministry improved the given process,” said the secretary of the Anticorruption Alliance Mircea Esanu. International expert Roger Vaughan said that the Ministry worked out more national clinical protocols than stipulated in the Threshold Country Program and created a sustainable system for formulating such protocols in the future. “This efficient system is unique in this region. We can not give instructions that the protocols be observed until they are finalized and distributed to all the medical institutions,” Roger Vaughan said. Fourteen quality councils have been set up in pilot medical-sanitary institutions to prepare the implementation of the national clinical protocols. According to the authorities, all the protocols will be published on the Health Ministry’s website. Measures are being taken to put them into the medical practice and in the activity of preparing medical staff. According to the third consolidated report on the implementation of the Threshold Country Program by the Government of Moldova, half of the patients in public medical institutions don’t know about the formulation of the clinical protocols and standards.