World Health Day celebrated on 7 April

World Health Day celebrated on 7 April, carries this year the slogan “Working together for health”, and is dedicated to medical workers’ activity. Today, thousands of medical institutions all over the world organize activities to attract the attention on the global crisis of medical employees, to underline the value of medical workers activity in keeping and strengthening population’s health. Despite the fact that Moldova has a good training background for medical staffs, the profiled institutions deal with lack of employees. According to a report of the Ministry of Health and Social Protection, the rate of ensuring the population with doctors decreased from 36.3 per 10,000 inhabitants in 1998 to 29.5 in 2005. In 2002-2005, a trend of reduction of the number of doctors in the health and social protection system, from 11,224 to 10,616 was registered. In certain districts, such as Cantemir, Rezina, Cimislia, Falesti and Causeni, the number of doctors constitutes only 50-66% of the necessary. Especially, is noted an insufficiency in ensuring with specialists in family medicine, emergency medicine, laboratory medicine, anesthesiology-reanimation, pathomorfology, especially in rural areas. The average age of working doctors gets in Moldova to 50, showing the insufficient involvement of young specialists, especially in the services of primary medical field. Of those 639 graduates of medicine colleges according to the repartition system only 480 were hired. In 2005, the Ministry of Health and Social Protection distributed for employment in medical-sanitary institutions 311 doctors. The average salary for doctors increased to 1,395.07 lei in 2005 compared to 765.08 lei in 2003, for nurses – 865.12 lei compared to 483.22 lei. Anyway, the average wage of doctors in Moldova is lower than the average on republic and rather modest than in neighbouring countries.