Warsaw: Debate about Emergency Rooms Highlight Disastrous Government Health Policies

Warsaw, a city with about 2.5 million inhabitants, has only one hospital emergency room working on evenings and weekends. For the whole city. This is of course a major disaster which shows the deadly consequences of government health policy. The Voivodship has come up with a "solution" to the problem: since the one hospital cannot even cope with the number of patients it receives, starting February 1, there will be 10 emergency rooms open all night in Warsaw.

This sounds like at least an improvement. Until you find out that the National Health Fund does not intend to invest money to ensure that these emergency rooms can function.

The state policy has been to underfund health care and to claim that hospitals are 'badly managed'. The underfunding of health care is obvious: Poland is at the bottom of the list of EU countries in terms of investment in health care. At the same time as all costs for medicine, equipment and labour is going up, the goverment has not wanted to increase investment, but instead expects hospitals to curb spending and proposes the commercialization or privatization of health care. The National Health Fund, which set budget limits for hospitals in advance, underbudgeted health care to such an extent that many hospitals ran out of money in October, November and December and started to turn away patients or provide them with only the minimal care. The government blames this problem on the hospitals.

According to the head of the Voivodship, hospitals should not demand extra money to open emergency room treatment in the evenings. However hospitals pointed out that when they must provide such services, their costs will increase dramatically.

Hospitals also point out that they do not have enough workers for this and that they haven't been given extra money to pay people.

A similar "solution" has already been put in place in Lodz. Workers there are complaining that there is now total chaos and the system is not working. The truth is that the system in general is not working, and that trying to "improve" services without investing anything is simply a farce.