In the activity on managerial autonomy for QSUNT and 4 regional hospitals, with the participation of Minister of Health, Albana Koçiu, Rama said that “I say this to highlight this effort without which it would be impossible to gather today for hospital autonomy certificates. It has been one of the strategic objectives to give the doctors in the public health service and the staff of servants in the public health system a power beyond the position of wage earners. And we should give the hospitals the freedom to manage their finances through managerial autonomy and create the possibility that the doctors, all of them, get paid with a horizontal salary by the state, but those who work more, perform more surgeries, deserve more and will be able to get paid even more.”

I think there is no reason whatsoever for the public health system to be the first choice of the Albanian citizens who can afford receiving care services from the private health care system. There is no reason for that.

Yes, some of the private hospital facilities actually offered much better conditions when we embarked on this path. But, this is no longer the case. The conditions at the internal medicine hospital or at other public health facilities are beyond compare, while the same doctors serve at both private and public systems. How come then that one should choose private hospitals and pay a lot for care service at private facilities if you can receive equally quality even better care from precisely the same doctors at public hospitals? The reason is just one; the still prevailing perception that public health care fails to offer decent conditions and where no care is delivered and stuff like this.

We initiate a new chapter thanks also to the fact that the Fier Memorial Hospital served as a model to pilot the managerial autonomy and, within a year we plan to launch the dual practice, so that the best-performing and most-in demand doctors working at public hospitals can offer and deliver care beyond regular work hours, can make use of the hospital facilities, equipment and conditions to deliver extra care in exchange of a payment, with 70% of it to be paid to doctors and 30% to be paid for the hospital and in this way we finally join Europe in terms of how we design and build the public system, with doctors being not merely health employees and being forced to look for ways to leave work at public hospitals and take up jobs at private sector to add something to their salary, but with all doctors receiving a decent salary instead. This way, every doctor can work more beyond regular work hours and be paid directly by this practice. This is one side of the process.

The other side – and I would like to emphasize it – as soon as we complete the entire needed process of estimating all cost, protocols and processes required to deliver on the financial autonomy through the managerial autonomy, the hospitals will be granted full autonomy, not only managerial, but also financial autonomy, and due funding will be allocated to hospitals and, acting as independent entity, they will decide how to spend funds, which medications they will procure and, at the same time, doctors will receive extra payment from the hospital revenue according to a clearly defined protocol.

/sm/