For the first time, we are above the European average in terms of the availability of innovative medicines - this would be the main news from Monday's Access GAP 2026 conference, if it were not for the fact that a huge problem has emerged: the financial crisis of the National Health Fund, which translates into the availability of services, including diagnostics, is taking its toll on real access to medicines.
Poland above EU average in access to innovative drugs. Real access to therapies increasingly difficult
Published May 26, 2026 07:58
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The Ministry of Health makes reimbursement decisions and allows new therapies, but "fails" access to diagnostics, opening - very often - the possibility of benefiting from modern treatment. This is determined, on the one hand, by the lengthening queues to AOS and diagnostic tests, on the other hand, by not reimbursing some tests, including, for example, molecular tests.
What's more, experts taking part in the debate have no doubt that problems with balancing the NHF budget - at the moment the financial gap may be PLN 17-18 billion and must be "bridged" by the end of the year, and there is no indication that the Finance Minister can put such a sum on the table - will have an impact on the drug area, and not just indirectly anymore. There has been talk, among other things, of plans to reduce the lists of free drugs, but the spectrum of possible decisions is broader.
Prof. Alina Kulakowska, president of the Polish Neurological Society, said that new reimbursement decisions are being made, but at the same time patients' access to reimbursed molecules is deteriorating directly. - Drug programs are well structured, many new drugs are available under them, but financially we have reached a wall in many programs, she argued, adding that the limits imposed in contracts do not allow patients to be treated without putting hospitals into debt. Waiting times for payments from the National Health Service are also lengthening. - At the moment we are receiving the last reimbursements for the purchase of medicines for 2025. And funding for staff work is still unaccounted for," she recalled.
As for the report itself, showing the availability of innovative medicines in the Visegrad countries, the summary index of availability of innovative therapies in Poland dropped from 61.5 to 58.5 points compared to last year - Poland, however, maintained its second place in the V4 (the Czech Republic is invariably the leader). Declines were recorded by all four countries subject to the analysis, i.e. also the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, which partly explains the change in methodology, removing SMA and Parkinson's disease from the catalog of diseases and replacing it with the area of cardiology.
Poland is the region's leader in terms of the number of new drugs covered by reimbursement, although differences can be seen between medical fields - the best is in oncology and rare diseases, worse in cardiology and, in general, chronic population diseases.
The biggest improvements have been - looking through the lens of specific diseases - in the treatment of ovarian cancer (thanks to the inclusion of two new drugs in reimbursement) and acute myeloid leukemia. Where there has been deterioration is weighed not by reimbursement decisions but by access to diagnostics. - For the past two years, access for patients has been deteriorating despite the new reimbursement decisions, Dr. Wladysiuk concluded. This also applies to oncology patients: data from DiLO cards relating to the timeliness of initial and in-depth diagnostics show that it is the worst in five years.
