The Health Minister wants to loosen the staffing pressures currently placed on hospitals by payer requirements. On Thursday, she presented the outlines of her program, based on three pillars: deregulation, transformation and the inversion of the benefits pyramid, at a meeting with local government officials and local government hospitals. She ruled out, however, limiting statutory minimum wage increases, as demanded by directors.
Hospital reform: Minister Izabela Leszczyna's three pillars
Published July 12, 2024 07:34
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- I was most pleased to find that the system change team even copied some of the demands formulated for years by hospital directors," Minister Izabela Leszczyna told reporters, thanking the organizers of the meeting, the National Association of County Hospital Employers, for the substantive discussion and openness to the proposals prepared by the system change team. The minister stressed many times that she does not intend to push her solutions, that directors and founding bodies will be able to decide autonomously whether they want to join the transformation process and take advantage of the package of incentives offered as part of it.
The reforms of hospitality - and the entire system - are to be based on three pillars: deregulation (this includes such changes that will make it more flexible to transform 24-hour wards into day wards or even into outpatient clinics, and free hospitals from having to buy up doctors for each other, which translates into a spiraling wage spiral), transformation (the key here is to be new formulas of medical activity such as the Complex of Healthcare Institutions or the District Health Center) and reversing the pyramid of benefits.
Many of the directors who spoke in the discussion pointed first and foremost to the revenue aspect of hospitals, demanding improvements in the valuation of services, while on the cost side - primarily to reduce the impact of the Minimum Wage Law. - Some procedures are priced too high, and some are priced too low. Without changes in this regard, we simply cannot cope. What's more, the benefit valuations of procedures should be valorized just as they are for statutorily guaranteed salaries," the minister and her colleagues heard. One director warned that if the minimum wage law is maintained in its current form (not to mention proposals to raise rates for nurses, among others), the MZ plan will collapse. Other speakers spoke of the need to suspend the law, pointing out that it absorbs the lion's share, if not all, of the increase in expenditures. The topic of "contract chimneys" also resonated strongly, especially in some specialties.
- I understand that the minimum wage law hurts hospital directors and creating bodies. On the other hand, expecting me to take back in the first six months what the previous government gave is unrealistic. We will analyze this law. I will be open to talk about the law, but today we are meeting to talk and transform the system," the minister said during the meeting. During the press conference, she stressed that the solutions she is proposing will bring tangible relief to hospitals in the area of salaries as well, because they will mean that they will not have to search so dramatically for doctors to ensure that they remain in the network, for example.
