I'm nervously refreshing the parliamentary pages, because Wednesday marks the beginning of the session where pro-equality bills are scheduled to return. This time dually, as parliamentary bills. Former Deputy Health Minister Jozefa Szczurek-Zelazko, the same one who in April stopped the already passed bill on quality in health care and patient safety with a vote of abstention, helping to sustain the Senate's veto, is now piloting an amendment to the Law on Patients' Rights and Patients' Ombudsman, which includes a block of provisions on the Medical Events Compensation Fund.
Column: What is the quality?
Published May 22, 2023 09:31
This is the less controversial part of the endeavor, which is designed to circumvent the vote that was lost a few weeks ago, and even so - just a cursory reading of the draft, especially without an explanatory memorandum, one can guess that there will be "no end to the laughs" during the first reading, when all doubts will be clarified. Particularly a lot of "fun" will probably be provided by Article 13, which specifies the maximum limits of "expenditures resulting from the financial effect of the law" and states that in 2023 it will be... PLN 837,472. No, it doesn't mean that this is how much money will be at the disposal of the Medical Event Compensation Fund, but we are dealing with, at the very least, careless writing of the legislation, which has provided a bite for many trying to figure out how much compensation money there will actually be.
There is no indication that MP Czeslaw Hoc's draft, which addresses the health minister's most important issue - paying for quality - does not contain old and new pitfalls. They may be feared by local government hospitals, which last week sounded the alarm - for the umpteenth time - about their dramatic and deteriorating economic situation, calling for streamlining the process of retarification of health services so that hospitals do not have to operate under conditions of mounting losses.
Watching the legislative process will be another intellectual adventure. It is hardly surprising that a journalist would already want to know if and when the first reading of the two bills will take place, which, nota bene, 48 hours before the start of the session, have not even been assigned parliamentary print numbers yet.
Why the delay? The parliamentary track allows for a lack of public consultation, but on Friday afternoon the Compensation Fund draft was sent for consultation to selected institutions - including the Supreme Medical Council and the Supreme Council of Nurses and Midwives. There is no such annotation with Czeslaw Hoc's draft, but it can be expected that it will follow in the footsteps of the first draft, that the opinions of the Legislative Bureau of the Sejm and the Bureau of Parliamentary Analyses will not be enough.
