MZ: staffing crisis in nursing, doctors will be oversupplied

To put it simply: the medical faculties that have opened in recent years will result in too many doctors for the system's needs and capacities - at least according to the Health Ministry's projections. However, nothing during the subcommittee's meeting indicated that this would be a rationale for closing those medical faculties that do not have a positive PKA opinion and are currently being audited.

The standing subcommittee on the organization of health care considered information on March 19 on medical personnel in the health care system (numbers and needs) by professional groups and specialties. The medical profession in particular was put under the microscope. The report was presented on behalf of the ministry by the director of the Department of Medical Personnel Development at the Ministry of Health, Mariusz Klencki, who described the information prepared for MPs as "conservative" because it took into account not all physicians with PWZs, but those actually working with patients, whether in the public or private sector. Klencki stressed that "the reports circulating in the public space that Poland has a very low ratio of doctors per 100,000 residents of 2.4 are not supported by the facts." - It's not 2.4, but 3.6, he stressed, adding that among OECD countries we are "in the middle of the pack." The fact that the "generation of new doctors" and their referral to the system has managed to increase over the 2019-2022 period is, in his opinion, due to the fact that various steps have been taken to make this happen, resulting in an increase of as much as 8 percent in the number of active doctors. What did Director Klencki fail to mention? The increase in the rate from 2.4 to 3.6, or 50 percent, is not the result of "various steps," but a change in the counting methodology - which the CSO reported some time ago, and the higher rate itself has been appearing in reports (including international reports) for at least a year. What's more, the latest data on the matter was provided during the Congress of Health Challenges by Dr. Iwona Kowalska-Bobko of CM UJ: for Poland, the rate is 3.5, but the EU average is 4 (previously 3.7).

What are the problems with medical staff? First of all - differences between regions. While the rate of doctors in the Mazowieckie Voivodeship is 5.8, there are regions where it is twice as low (although, as Mariusz Klencki said, it is also increasing there, thanks to "the expansion of the base of institutions training medical staff, for example in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship and Podkarpacie." - The effect is not rigid, and it doesn't always happen that a person graduating from a particular region stays there, but very often it does.

The high average age of doctors is also a problem, although, as the MZ representative stressed, the effect of "increasing the fraction of doctors who are relatively young" is being achieved thanks to the increase in the number of medical students in recent years. The average age of doctors is still high, although this fact flows from the high professional activity of doctors who could have already retired. This doesn't mean that "we have some alarm because we have this cadre aging."

Director Klencki pointed to the dynamic growth in the number of places on medical faculties, which increased by 162 percent between 2005 and 2002, as an achievement.

Although Klencki cautioned that the report does not take into account many variables, he was tempted to theorize that we may even have too many doctors in a few years. - In a few years we should have a phenomenon unprecedented in history, that is, an oversupply of doctors," he said (it is worth noting here that three decades ago, at the beginning of the 1990s, we had an oversupply of doctors and the situation lasted a good few years, the effect of which was a radical reduction in medical school places and terrible working conditions, which triggered economic emigration, which intensified after Poland's accession to the EU).

The increase in the number of active physicians in Poland is also influenced by the influx of representatives of the profession from Ukraine - at the moment there are about 6,000 of them, and, as Director Klencki said, they will continue to flow in until the end of June (that's when the regulations for Ukrainian citizens change). As he said, 70-80 percent of these doctors will probably want to stay in Poland.