The Residents' Agreement is preparing a petition to President Andrzej Duda to veto the "Law on Quality in Health Care and Patient Safety." - We have been trying to fix this law, but it has met with firm resistance from the authors," comments Sebastian Goncerz, chairman of the Residents' Agreement.
Quality Law. Residents call for presidential veto
Published April 5, 2023 12:59
In the opinion of doctors, the Law on Quality is harmful and does not meet its basic objectives. The solutions proposed by the authors are ineffective and deviate from international recommendations.
- The developers do not benefit from these years of experience and create a system that will not work. A document adopted by the European Council in 2007 lists what points such a system should meet. According to this, reporting of an adverse event should be anonymous, and participants should have sufficient time to submit it. In addition, it should be as unsanctioned as possible, and the reporter should have as much response as possible regarding what the report was used for, Sebastian Goncerz points out.
Instead, the government's quality bill designs a system in which, once an incident is recorded, there is an obligation to report it immediately to an internal registry, with details of the reporter, the patient and all participants. Protection from employer reprisals, however, extends only to those who have been informed that they are included in such a report.
The medical entity, in turn, is obliged to provide information from the notification to the central registry within a maximum of 72 hours of its occurrence. Otherwise, it faces a fine of up to PLN 10,000.
Medics also point out, among other things, the lack of change in the criminal liability of medical personnel for adverse events. The law only provides for extraordinary leniency, that is, the possibility of reducing the sentence after it has been passed.
- Throughout the legislative process, we tried to get this law repaired, despite the fact that in our opinion it is harmful in its entirety. This was met with firm resistance from the authors of the law. Virtually none of our amendments passed, and we have no choice but to call for the rejection of this law in its entirety," says Sebastian Goncerz.
The chairman of the Residents' Agreement also stresses that during the last procedure, a provision appeared in the law, stating that an amount of up to PLN 50 million was transferred. from the NFZ reserve fund to the physical education fund. In his opinion, this money should be used exclusively for health care, and not for a fund with little if any connection to the content of the bill.
The Residents' Agreement is preparing a petition to the President of the Republic of Poland to veto the "Health Care Quality and Patient Safety Act." Details can be found HERE
