Changes to healthcare pay. What will the new minister do with Leszczyna's ideas?

On July 31, the Tripartite Team for Healthcare was to continue talks on the remuneration of medical professionals.
The Ministry of Health has proposed changes to contract workers. These changes primarily affect physicians.
The Ministry wants to abolish the so-called "procedure percentage" and specify the conditions for concluding contracts
These proposals were made by the previous leadership of the Ministry of Health.
Members of the tripartite team are expecting a meeting with the new Minister of Health, Jolanta Sobierańska-Grenda, to learn her position on remuneration.

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" A doctor can't be like a traveling salesman, traveling with a suitcase to various, often distant, hospitals . I'm also opposed to contracts that include a percentage of the procedure, because then the doctor becomes the contractor for procedures that hide the patient," explained then-Minister of Health Izabela Leszczyna in an interview for money.pl.

Last week, members of the Tripartite Team for Healthcare received a letter signed by Deputy Minister of Health Jerzy Szafranowicz regarding proposals for contract regulation.

These concerns primarily concern physicians. Approximately 75% of their workforce works under contracts. In other professions, the proportion is reversed.

The Ministry of Health has proposed that a medic could be employed on a contract basis, but on the condition that it is not less than half-time (in the case of a contract based on a basis other than an employment relationship or a service relationship - the equivalent of not less than half-time).

Employment on a contract of a smaller duration will be possible when it concerns only one service provider.

The ministry also wants to move away from remunerating doctors based on the so-called "percentage of the procedure."

- The remuneration specified in the contracts (...) cannot be defined as a percentage of the service provider's remuneration resulting from the contract for the provision of health care services - proposes the Ministry of Health.

The method of reporting data on the earnings of healthcare workers to the Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Tariff System would also change.

Currently, they are anonymized , which makes it impossible to determine how many places the same medic works in.

According to the Ministry of Health's proposal, data from clinics would be assigned a PESEL number and a professional license number.

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This letter was published on the social website on the day of the swearing-in of the new Minister of Health, Jolanta Sobierańska-Grenda.

The new proposals are scheduled to be discussed at a meeting of the tripartite group on Thursday, July 31.

As determined by Rynek Zdrowia, this meeting will not take place. Team members have asked the new head of the ministry to schedule a meeting with the team's presidium, which would serve as a new opening for dialogue.

As we hear, it is difficult to talk about the predecessor's proposals without knowing the position of the new minister.

Let us recall that when announcing the government reconstruction, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced the departisanization and depoliticization of the entire Ministry of Health .

"In the coming days, this ministry will be handed over exclusively to management experts. The sole goal will be, to put it bluntly, not to improve the situation of doctors, but to improve the situation of patients, " Tusk emphasized.

These announcements indicate that some changes will be made to doctors' contracts. Whether these changes are proposed by the previous minister or the new one will become clear in the coming days and weeks.

Doctors: the Prime Minister's words are a prelude to cutting the salaries of medical workers

"You can't improve the situation of patients by attacking doctors"

" We have long been the target of political attacks because our salaries are high compared to average Polish wages. It's easy to accuse public health funds of going towards doctors' salaries, not treatment. But that's nonsense," Jakub Kosikowski , spokesman for the Supreme Medical Chamber, told PAP.

"There are currently 144,000 doctors working in Poland, so it's impossible to say that salaries running into the hundreds of thousands of złoty are the cause of the current healthcare collapse. We view the Prime Minister's words as preparations to cut wages for all medical professions , as everything indicates that these are the intentions behind the changes to the minimum wage law in healthcare," he added.

In an interview with Rynek Zdrowia, the president of AOTMiT, Daniel Rutkowski, calculated that the median earnings of doctors in one job range between PLN 22,000 and PLN 25,000 gross (including all benefits) .

"The data shows that there are several hundred doctors—between 450 and 500—whose salaries exceed 100,000 PLN per full-time position. Our data is anonymized, meaning we can't calculate how much a given person earns, only how much they earn in a given facility," Rutkowski explained.

- It is impossible to improve the situation of patients by attacking doctors - commented on the Prime Minister's words, commenting on the chairwoman of the National Trade Union of Physicians, Grażyna Cebula-Kubat .

- If Prime Minister Tusk thinks that he will improve the situation of patients by turning society against doctors, he is very wrong - she added, pointing out that once again there is an attempt to shift the blame for the dramatic state of health care onto the medical community.