News

The Associated tissue bank in University Hospital in Košice started the reconstruction. It will result in the modern laboratories and outpatient part. Work should be completed in May 2012, the costs were calculated to € 1.134 million. Medical and laboratory equipment will cost more than € 1 million. The hospital received money from the EU Operational programme Health.

Medical trade unions from the countries of Visegrad Four (V4) agreed to establish a common federation, in which they will join the forces. Health trade unionists from Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland want to increase pressure on their governments to enforce their interest. According to the head of Polish trade union club current situation in the health care system can no longer be tolerated. He also said that the post-communist countries did not take over the design of health systems in Western Europe, which had a negative impact on staff and patients.

According to daily Hospodárske noviny from 4/11/2011 more than ten thousand patients are waiting for a planned operation. Although the law says that no one should wait for the operation longer than one year, there are thousands of them. There are 2 400 patients on the waiting lists of Všeobecná zdravotná poisťovňa. The longest waiting times are for the hip replacements and other orthopaedic surgery. Hospitals put patients on the waiting lists when they can not treat them within 3 months. The reason may be a lack of material, physicians on the leave of absence, financial limits from insurance companies or high number of patients already on the list.

According to daily Pravda from 5/11/2011 Ministry of Health in the new regulation shifts about 100 pharmaceuticals to the list of supplementary medicines, which are not covered by the health insurance. Ministry in the case of these pharmaceuticals explained, that in many cases they are the medicines without sufficient documented evidence of clinical efficacy or they are too expansive. Experts oppose and argue some of these pharmaceuticals can not be replaced by others.

162,000 people want to change the health insurance company from the January next year and most of them opted for the private insurance company Dôvera, which will grow by more than 40,000 policyholders. Všeobecná zdravotná poisťovňa will continue as the biggest health insurance company, but will lose its 61,000 policyholders. Private health insurance company Union grew by 20 000 clients. The insurance company Dôvera informed, that 2/3 of new clients are economically inactive people.

President Ivan Gašparovič has recommended the Minister of Health Ivan Uhliarik to stop the transformation of hospitals into joint-stock companies. He has recommended Government not to adopt the Certificates of Corporation and to postpone the transformation until the early elections. According to President the public fears that the transformation would lead to privatization and thereby to the abolition of state medical facilities. At the same time he addressed himself to medical trade unions to initiate the withdrawal of physicians' notices.

The control of The Healthcare Surveillance Authority focused on regulations compliance with the listings of insured persons waiting for the provision of planned health care revealed several problems. Control has for example shown that providers keep their own waiting lists and insurance companies do not include to the lists those patients, whose planned term of operation is longer that one year. Among other things, Authority also found that insurance companies do not keep lists for the screening mammography.

After the transformation of hospitals into joint-stock companies the health insurance companies may have even more important word in the field of health care provision, according to etrend.sk. Protest of doctors may help insurance companies to reduce deficiently busy departments and to cancel some beds. If the departure of doctors actually occurs, hospitals will have to proceed in merging of departments and the closure of beds. Provision of health care should be thereby moved to the hospitals and departments, which will be able to provide it and the resources of insurance companies will be focused exactly in these facilities.

According to weekly Zdravotnícke noviny from 3/11/2011 medical trade unionists and doctors have critical comments to the draft law on wages of nurses and midwives. According to them, the intention to guarantee an adequate level of remuneration to only two, albeit very important groups of employees in the sector, is systemless and discriminates the employees of other professions in health care. Slovak Medical Chambre has proposed to withdraw the proposal from the legislative process. Chamber considers unacceptable if there is an isolated claiming by one group of employees.

Doctors did not start to withdraw their resignation notices even after the pressure from hospitals and Ministry of Health. Critical situation in health care provision could thereby occur in next few days, because many hospitals are pushing the doctors to draw their leaves of absence. This is happening despite the fact, that there is no one to replace them and crisis plans of the particular hospital managements count at most with the interference of the departments and sending patients to the other hospitals. Most of them are in the same situation though.