The Supreme Medical Council wants to limit doctors’ working hours to 78 hours per week and 312 hours per month—a limit that would apply to every doctor, regardless of their employment status. Importantly, work in the private sector—including in a doctor’s own practice—would also count toward this limit.
The Medical Council wants to set a limit on doctors' working hours. A maximum of 78 hours per week
Published June 25, 2026 07:50
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This limit refers to the number of hours for a full-time physician who has signed an opt-out clause. However, given that this would be an absolute maximum covering all locations where services are provided, if it were to take effect, the change would be greater than it might seem (currently, a doctor with an opt-out clause can work that number of hours “full-time,” and still, for example, see patients at their own private practice).
What’s more, the vast majority of medical specialists (about two-thirds) are not currently employed full-time, but on a contract basis—that is, under civil law contracts or B2B arrangements—and their working hours are not regulated at all, a fact that representatives of the National Health Fund, among others, have emphatically reiterated in recent days. Even if, during an audit, the payer discovers a very high number of working hours for a contract physician, there is no legal basis to consider this an irregularity and take further action. One of the doctors who reported “excessive” (unregulated) working hours is a 29-year-old doctor from the Southern Hospital, the central figure in a scandal that has been unfolding for two weeks, which began when it was reported that that a doctor starting his career at the hospital had earned over 1.5 mln zł in a year, while the number of hours worked per month hovered around 330. Dawid Kacprzyk worked as a contract doctor.
The medical self-governing body declares that it wants to discuss limits on doctors’ working hours and proposes a monitoring system (ideally conducted, following the German model, by medical chambers) and an integrated automatic alert system that is triggered when a doctor approaches the limit of permissible working hours.
The call to monitor and limit doctors’ working hours was strongly emphasized during the Health Committee’s discussion of the bill on collecting contracts using PESEL and PWZ numbers (which is currently before the Senate). This is intended to be one of the elements of a package of measures proposed by the Ministry of Health, focusing on doctors’ working models and earnings: a cap on a doctor’s potential earnings, a fixed percentage of hospital budgets allocated to labor costs, greater ties between contract physicians and healthcare facilities (a minimum work requirement equivalent to a half-time position), etc.
