NIL: we are counting on the president's veto

The head of the medical self-government, Dr. Lukasz Jankowski, requested the meeting with President Karol Nawrocki after the Parliament passed a law with a "throw-in" last week, extending the deadline for providing the certificate by a year - with the statutory deadline passing on May 1.

District medical chambers have already managed to extinguish about two hundred PWZs out of the thousand or so affected. The doctors stress that they hope the Senate will correct the bill, but if the upper chamber fails to do so, they will convince the president to veto the bill. - The condition for successful treatment is always the doctor's understanding of the patient, and this cannot be achieved without the doctor's knowledge of the Polish language. We are the only country in Europe with such low language proficiency requirements for foreign doctors. If someone has not achieved B1-level Polish language skills for two years, he or she should not count on the state's leniency or indefinite extensions," the NRL president said.

The local government, at the time of enactment of the provision on the obligation to present a certificate (it is worth recalling that at the time of opening the labor market to doctors from outside the EU, that is, in practice, from Belarus and Ukraine, the MZ did not put the condition of documenting language skills at all, allowing only the submission of a statement to this effect) demanded the requirement of a B2 certificate, although the standard is, when applying for the opportunity to practice medicine, a C1 certificate, often with an additional exam in the medical language.

It is worth noting that the issue does not concern only physicians, but all medical professionals practicing under the PWZ. According to the regulations still in force, they had until May 1 to submit a document certifying their knowledge of the language to the relevant district professional self-government councils - on pain of expiration of the PWZ. The MZ in late April and early May asked the professional self-governments not to rush into decisions, signaling that the regulations would be revised. Indeed, at the end of April, during work on the amendment to the Infectious Diseases Law, the Civic Coalition proposed a relevant amendment.

The medical self-government, however, has been proceeding since the beginning of May to extinguish PWZs for doctors who have not provided certificates. The nurses' and midwives' self-government has decided to send reminders to those who have not fulfilled their obligation.