Health Ministry to canvass patients in nationwide poll

The Ministry of Health is set to launch a poll in order to find out the opinions of people about the quality of medical services. This is said to be the first nationwide canvass to be organized by the authorities in a bid to crack down on corruption in medical establishments and upgrade their services, Info-Prim Neo reports. At a project launch conference on Thursday, Deputy Health Minister Mircea Buga recognized he wasn't satisfied with the quality of the medical services. “Regretfully, in recent years financing for the medical institutions has increased several times, but quality leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, the level of corruption inside medical institutions is still quite high”, said the deputy minister. According to him, all the subsequent policies and strategies undertaken by the ministry in the area of public health will build on the results of the poll. Canvassing will start next Monday, on July 21, and will last until January 2009. The Ministry of Health has announced the intention to poll more than 20,000 patients, beneficiaries of the medical services provided by 96 public medical and sanitary institutions throughout the country. They will be questioned about doctor's office waiting times, unofficial pays, quality of services, conditions in hospitals, and doctors' politeness. The obtained data will be processed by the National Center for Public Health Management. The fact that the processing and assessment of the data will be done by a body subordinated to the Ministry of Health questions the reliability of the future poll, thinks Arcadie Barbarosie, the director of the Public Policy Institute. “The question is how objective these data will be, knowing that they are not collected by an institution independent from the Ministry of Health”. In response, Valeriu Sava, head of the health insurance department at the Ministry, says there are enough guarantees to ensure the objectiveness of the survey. “The processing will be done using computers, and all the questioners will be kept in their original form”, Valeriu Sava explained. The project is financed by the U.S. government as part of the Millennium Challenge Corp.'s Threshold Country Plan for Moldova.