Government approves health care reform – Home – PRAVDA.sk

The government on Wednesday approved health care reform. Hospitals are to be divided into several levels. The first real changes in practice will begin in 2024.

Photo: TASR

On the right, Prime Minister Eduard Heger and Minister of Health Vladimír Lengvarský

According to the Ministry of Health, this is the biggest reform in the last 17 years. It should bring fewer unnecessary deaths, more lives saved, better working conditions for health professionals and their stabilization.

After the new one, hospitals should operate at five levels – community, regional, comprehensive, terminal and national. This should create an optimized network of hospitals. The Ministry of Health (MZ) emphasized that it would be meticulously explaining in the field for a few more months the essence of the reform and its benefits for the people of Slovakia.

The hospitals that will be on the list should be entitled to reimbursement from public health insurance. The Ministry reminds that it will bring fewer unnecessary deaths, more lives saved or better working conditions for health professionals, which will bring the necessary stabilization of medical staff.

The resort emphasizes that no hospital will be closed. Beds that remained unused before the pandemic will be transformed in a few years’ time, based on very precise analyzes and data, to another type of care that many patients today lack and therefore find it difficult to return to their normal lives.

The ministry promises that “not everything will be done everywhere and in small numbers”. According to the ministry, doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals will work with the new devices in larger teams, thanks to the reform, where they will be better able to manage the patient’s health complications. The reform should increase the safety and quality of healthcare.

The optimization of the hospital network is part of a wider package of reforms that will follow immediately after its adoption. It is tied to the historically largest investment funds of one billion euros.

In Slovakia, a new way of defining a minimum network of providers of general outpatient care for adults as well as for children and adolescents should be introduced. This should be brought about by a new law on the categorization of institutional health care from the workshop of the Ministry of Health (MH) of the Slovak Republic, which was approved by the government on Wednesday. Its aim is to improve the situation of a shortage of doctors for residents in local accessibility at the district level.

The Ministry wants to define the outpatient network on the basis of specified parameters, and should monitor and evaluate the results every year. The parameters for the classification of districts will be the number of inhabitants who do not have local accessibility, as well as the capacity throughput and the demographic structure of doctors. This should result in the classification of districts as secured, risky, risky and critically deficient.

This information should be provided by the Ministry of Health of the Slovak Republic to doctors who would be interested in setting up a new practice. This should help you decide where to set up your ambulance. They should also benefit from higher territorial units, as they have powers in the form of issuing permits or approving office hours. The ministry expects this to help them become coordinators of a network of outpatient care providers.

The law should also allow for the possibility of financial support for the establishment of new ambulances in scarce districts in the form of a one-time contribution of approximately 60,000 euros, which are to go from the recovery and resilience plan. Brand new doctors could also apply for this, as well as existing providers who will employ a new doctor who is not yet interested in setting up their own practice.

The Ministry of Health assumes that this step will support young doctors after graduation to return to their homeland or other disadvantaged or at-risk regions.

In the next phases, the support of general outpatient clinics for existing providers and the definition of a new concept of general medicine should be addressed. It should bring about an extension of the competencies of general practitioners and nurses, or, for example, a reduction in the administrative burden.

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