Two draft regulations of the Minister of Health regarding new rules for calculating waiting times for health care services have been submitted for public consultation.
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Projected waiting times for services: MZ introduces new formulas
Published Dec. 8, 2025 08:16
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Two draft regulations of the Minister of Health, which introduce new rules for calculating waiting times for health care services, have been submitted for public consultation. The regulations are intended to create a uniform, nationwide system for forecasting queues for publicly funded services.
The first draft concerns how to calculate the baseline projected waiting time. This is the indicator necessary for the first determination of projected waiting time, as referred to in the Law on publicly funded health care services. According to the proposed regulations, the first projected waiting time is to be calculated in August 2026 for data for July 2026. For this purpose, it will be necessary to establish in advance the so-called baseline value for June 2026.
The baseline projected waiting time is to be calculated based on average waiting times for up to 12 months. In practice, this means adding up the average waiting times from consecutive months and relating them to the number of months in which the waiting list was actually maintained.
The second draft regulation sets out the rules for calculating projected waiting times for individual providers. According to the draft, the National Health Fund will be responsible for calculating the indicator. This solution is intended to ensure uniformity, comparability and high quality of data across the country.
The new mechanism is based on an exponential moving average, which gives more weight to the most recent data. The formula takes into account both the average waiting time in a given month and the projected value from the previous month. As a result, the index is expected to respond more quickly to changes in actual queue lengths at specific providers.
The draft stipulates that the projected waiting time will be calculated based on data from the 12 months preceding the month of publication. If the value exceeds 30 days, the waiting time will be presented in months to make it easier for patients to interpret.
Source: RCL
