Professional skills of doctors and dentists

The draft regulation was reviewed by the Presidium of the Supreme Medical Council. Read the position

- The just-introduced regulation containing a list of professional skills for physicians and dentists complements the hitherto dead provision in Article 17 of the Law on the Profession of Physician and Dentist enabling their acquisition and specifying the conditions for their award. The draft regulation was reviewed by the Presidium of the NRL as early as September 2022, which raised many objections to it. Unfortunately, some of them were not taken into account, including our strongly advocated deletion from the list of shallow sedation skills, which, in our opinion, as requiring a great deal of experience and potentially dangerous, should be reserved exclusively for anesthesiologists. It is also still unclear what the proper purpose of the introduction of skills is - when introducing this provision into the Law on the Profession of Physician and Dentist, the Ministry argued that skills were to replace some of the specialties, which everyone agrees we have too many of in Poland, but no changes have taken place in this regard. Likewise, there is currently no provision that would promote, for example, additional funding for the procedures performed for those who acquire the skills. On the other hand, there is a justified fear that the payer, i.e. the National Health Fund, looking for savings, may stop financing procedures that will be performed by doctors without a skills certificate (and it will certainly take some time to acquire it), which may result in further restriction of access to medical procedures and lengthening of waiting queues, comments Klaudiusz Komor, vice-president of the NRL.