Health Minister Kamil Sasko (Hlas-SD) presented to the representatives of the health-care sector in Trnava region proposals for more than 30 specific measures to improve the Slovak health sector in six areas, TASR learnt from the minister on Tuesday after his meeting in Trnava.
The main topics of the meeting were, for example, the staffing situation in the regions, the need to train health professionals and the availability of health care.
Sasko outlined the proposed measures. "The first area is the standardisation of payments for medical services. The second one is the optimisation of costs for health-care providers, the third area is the standardisation of the conditions of health-care provision, the fourth one is the financing of the system, the fifth is the reduction of the administrative burden and digitisation. And the last one, and today's discussion, by the way, has also confirmed this absolutely unequivocally, is the management of human resources across the sector," added the minister.
The aim of the measures, according to him, is and must be the patient in each region. He stated that the staffing situation in the regions was the central topic of the meeting.
The minister stated that communication with the regions is important for improving health care. On Tuesday, he started a series of meetings with representatives of self-governing regions, where he presents proposals for solutions. "I'll also visit Trencin and Nitra this week, and in the next three weeks I'll visit all eight self-governing regions in Slovakia," he added.
On Tuesday the Minister also met with the doctors union to discuss the first item of the 2022 memorandum concerning the financing of hospitals and agreed that a working group needs to be formed to address the issue, LOZ head Peter Visolajsky reported after meeting the minister.
The doctors haven't withdrawn their notices yet and insist on having the Government deal with the problems in the health sector.
"It's crucial for us to fix this, so that it's clear what insurers actually pay hospitals for. We want to have standardised contracts between hospitals and insurers and be able to check them because that enables also checking the efficiency of hospitals. If you have a contract that's checkable, comparable between hospitals, it's easy to ascertain which hospital met its commitments, performed as many surgeries and treated as many patients as promised and which hospital didn't. So, on our behalf, we insist on having standardised contracts that will be transparent and public," explained Visolajsky.
Visolajsky added that doctors are not entertaining the withdrawal of their notices at the moment and wish to go through all items of the referendum with the minister first. The next meeting has been slated for Thursday (November 14).
Source: TASR
