The Minister of Health, Alexandru Rogobete, said on Wednesday evening that the Anesthesia and Intensive Care Departments (ATI) in hospitals that treat cases with high complexity are facing problems regarding the provision of staff due to the old regulations on the basis of which hiring is done in the Romanian health system.
Minister of Health, Alexandru Rogobete. PHOTO: gov.ro
“We regulate an Intensive Care Unit from Neurosurgery in the same way, for example, where there are large burns, where there are very heavy, complex patients, and where you need additional human resources, we regulate in the same way as an Intensive Care Unit from a city hospital where patients only stay post-anesthesia for 3 hours. However, the human resource requirement for the complexity of the case is different. We will take into account all these parameters to properly regulate, because then we will be able to avoid situations of exhaustion, over-request”said the minister, on Medika TV.
Rogobete explained that the personnel regulations in the Romanian health system work according to a Soviet model, based on which the number of employees in a hospital is calculated according to the number of beds. “This model does not take into account the complexity of cases and the way medicine has evolved,” emphasized the minister.
He specified that, compared to the average of the European Union, Romania registers only 0.6 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, but the major problem is the distribution of personnel: “Our distribution is very bad. Why is the distribution very bad? Because the personnel regulations are old. I, for example, at the University, in the ATI department, can no longer hire nurses now because the regulations have been reached, although the need for the complexity of the case is much greater.”
The minister announced that the staffing regulations, which have not been updated for about 20 years and are based on a 1974 model, will be amended to better reflect staffing needs based on the complexity of cases and to prevent overstretching of medical staff.
