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The minister of health: over 25,000 doctors have left Romania over the last ten years
The minister of health, Victor Costache stated on Tuesday that over 25,000 doctors have left the health system of Romania over the last ten years, and the solution of increasing salaries was not the best solutions to bring them back.
He stated that the main way of making the doctors from abroad to come back to the Romanian hospitals is that of improving the working conditions. He said that the ministry of health has short, medium and long term projects for the improvement of the conditions in hospitals.
‘This is why we have infrastructure plans with short, medium and long term measures. Long term measures include the project of regional hospitals which we support and which we develop, but you know that I was among the first who told the truth and showed what reality was and I said that these hospitals, if built, they will be finalized in 2026 – 2027 (…) Short and medium term measures – we have identified 170 million euro to be spent immediately until June’ the minister explained.
Costache spoke about a strategy through which the young doctors stop leaving the system, as he referred to the reform of residency. At the same time, he expressed his regret that the Romanian sanitary sector has one of the smallest budgets in the European Union.
Romania allocates in 2020 5.6% of the GDP to the sanitary sector, as the EU countries have asan average 9% allocated to health. ‘We have a global budget for health much smaller than it should be. We have 5.6% of GDP, allocated for health. We have the smallest budget in the EU for health. You know the European average is 9% and we must try in 2020, we must work together so that in 2021 we get closer to the European norm’ Costache said.
According to him, the budget proposed for the ministry of health in 2020 is 11.4 billion lei, 3.5 billion’ less than in 2019. He added that, in exchange, the budget of the National House for Health Insurance (CNAS) will increase from 38 billion lei in 2019 to 41 billion lei in 2020, as a result of the transfer of national programmes from the ministry of health to CNAS.