Election debate on health care: Politicians see opportunity for agreement across divides

MORE DOCTORS ARE NEEDED, BUT SOLIDLY EDUCATED ONES

The starting point for the first issue that the debaters leaned on was the words of Anna Rulkiewicz, CEO of the LuxMed Group, who said that she prefers an undereducated doctor to no doctor at all, because companies like the one she heads are able to train such medics properly.

MP Marcelina Zawisza of the Democratic Left Alliance disagreed with such a statement. She admitted that the shortage of doctors is a sore point in the Polish health care system, but every university should give a guarantee that the graduate who graduates from it will be able to ensure the safety of all its patients.

- If a university does not meet specific conditions, it should not be accredited and allowed to teach. We also need to rethink the whole system. It can't be that a doctor is doing tasks he shouldn't be doing. He should treat, take care of the patient. On the other hand, he should not be dealing with technical issues, organizational issues and paperwork. For eight years, the Law and Justice government, despite the very announcements of Minister Lukasz Szumowski, did not create a regulation, concerning medical secretaries," said Marcelina Zawisza.

- It shouldn't be the case that we allow people who don't know the Polish language, who don't have the right level of education, who graduated from a poor university to see patients. The issue of the quality of medical service delivery and patient care is a fundamental issue. We do not intend to lower this standard, and we are against the launching of medical faculties by more non-medical universities, especially since we have an infrastructure in the form of academic universities that is not fully utilized," assessed Przemyslaw Wipler, who is running in the parliamentary elections from the Confederation's list.

- As doctors ourselves, we are victims of our own efforts to increase the number of doctors. Over the past years, w...