- We note with regret that in the public discussion there is a shallowing narrative: "there are queues to doctors, so we are short of doctors." Meanwhile, as the analysis of the NIL's Health System Transformation and Development Strategy Team shows, the queues are the result of the inefficiency of the system, in which doctors spend more than half their time on bureaucracy and documentation, instead of helping patients, says Lukasz Jankowski, president of the Supreme Medical Council.
NIL: Poland on track to waste a billion zlotys a year on training surplus doctors
Published June 11, 2024 09:33
fot. NIL
- Patients need to be encapsulated with an appropriate ecosystem (e.g., therapy-supporting recovery assistants, dedicated registrars, medical secretaries) that responds to the changing needs of society - this includes other medical professionals and appropriate technological solutions," stresses Lukasz Jankowski.
According to the NRL's experts, maintaining the currently proposed limits on education (about 7800 places for Polish-language studies) in the coming years will result in a waste of up to 15 billion zlotys over the forecast period ( about 1 billion per year, starting in part already from 2026, when the first "oversupplied" doctors will begin their studies).
- These funds will be spent on training doctors "for export" or to do the work of the missing nurses, caregivers, assistants and secretaries simultaneously. This is all the more shocking because the Ministry of Health's supply model shows convergent conclusions about the number of doctors in the future, but in no way have these numbers been confronted with an estimate of demand, which the Ministry of Health simply does not seem to have," says Krzysztof Zdobylak, an expert on the NRL's transformation and development strategy for the health care system in Poland.
NIL's transformation team, which has been in operation for almost six months, has developed a physician staffing model until 2048 (a 25-year perspective). Previously published analyses (benchmarked to 10 effective health care systems) indicate that we currently need about 4.1 doctors per 1,000 residents. Meanwhile, the level is (estimates for 2023) 3.4-3.6 (depending on the assumed number of residents, including refugees) - so the gap reaches about 15 percent.
However, recent analysis shows that only students who are already in medical school will be enough to reach this level.
Read more on NIL's website.
Source: compiled. based on: NIL
