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Romania, on the last four positions in European Index of medical systems
Romania ranks 32nd of 35 countries studied in the 2015 edition of Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI) and last for the most important category of indicators - treatment results, according to the report released by euro-health.ro on Tuesday.
EHCI is made by the Swedish company Health Consumer Powerhouse. Romania obtained 527 points out of a total of 1,000, being placed before Albania (524), Poland (523) and Montenegro (484).
The authors comment that “Romania has serious problems with the management of its entire public sector”and next to Albania and Bulgaria “is suffering because of an old medical assistance structure, with high hospital admission costs.”
The report includes 48 indicators grouped in six categories: patient rights and information, accessibility (time while waiting for treatment), treatment results, range of services offered and their expansion, prevention and pharmaceuticals. The combination of these indexes - obtained from studies and international data bases and from questionnaires administered to patient associations - intends to describe the way in which the consumer of medical services is served by his own system.
For the most important category- treatment results - Romania obtained 104 points of 250, ranking last next to Macedonia.
Compared to last year, when Romania was in the red, for all 8 indicators, the 2015 index granted better marks for the drop of cardiovascular deaths and deaths by cerebral vascular accident.
Low scored were registered for child death rates, survival in cancer, potential life years lost, MRSA infections, abortion rate and depression.
Romania has better results for accessibility, the second most important of the classification, where it received 150 out of 225 points, ranking 17th, before countries like Denmark, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden and Great Britain.
According to the report, Romania made progress for same day access to the family physician, direct access to a specialist physician, access to radiotherapy or chemotherapy under 21 days and waiting for emergency room.
Romania also accumulated 96 out of 150 points for the patients’ information rights (ranking 23rd), 63 out of 150 for the range of services and their expansion (place 31), 71 out of 125 for prevention (place 27) and 43 out of 100 for pharmaceuticals (33rd, better than Albania and Montenegro).
The Netherlands ranked first in EHCI 2015 classification, with 916 points, followed by Switzerland (894), Norway (854), Finland (845), Belgium (836), Luxembourg (832), Germany (828) and Iceland (825).