MZ: we want quick work on the law on hospitals

On July 1, the government approved a draft amendment to the Law on Health Services and Certain Other Laws, known as the "Law on Hospitality," or the "Law on Saving County Hospitals" (this is what Izabela Leszczyna herself calls the draft). The law, among other things, provides for facilitated mechanisms for consolidating facilities belonging to different founding bodies, but also regulates and clarifies issues of recovery programs for hospitals. As Leszczyna said, by law at the moment they must be prepared by entities that record any losses. The Ministry of Health assures that it wants to liberalize this provision: hospitals whose net loss exceeds 1 percent of total revenues will be obliged to prepare repair programs. But these programs will not be shelved - they will be checked and analyzed, and if the hospital successfully implements them, it will be able to take advantage of the debt forgiveness mechanism (although here the details are not yet available, as Leszczyna said, the Ministry of Finance is working on them all the time).

According to the health ministry, if the law had been in effect, nearly 240 hospitals, primarily district hospitals, would have had to prepare repair programs. - Since less than 240 hospitals out of about eight hundred had a loss of more than this 1 percent last year, this means that it is possible to manage hospitals in such a way as not to put them into debt, the health minister said. - County hospitals have the hardest time because of their very dense network. They compete among themselves for doctors, they compete for the contract with the National Health Service and they compete for patients, because there aren't that many patients," she stressed, noting that she doesn't think county hospitals are in trouble because of poor management.

The Health Ministry wants to reach out to directors and plans to launch training courses on writing remedial programs and conducting them. The trainings would start after the summer, and will be financed by EU FERS funds. - They won't be the kind of traditional training that you send managers, directors somewhere, they listen and get a certificate. Their program will have a training layer, but also a coaching layer," said Deputy Health Minister Katarzyna Kacperczyk. The ministry does not want hospitals to pay commercial companies to prepare the plans, believing that it would be better for them to benefit from the experience of managers who have created and implemented such programs.