Putin congratulated doctors on their professional holiday. Why don't doctors celebrate?

Medical Worker's Day in Russia is celebrated by all those who took the Hippocratic Oath: doctors, emergency medical workers, nurses, paramedics, orderlies and others. The main day for them is the third Sunday in June, in 2025 it falls on the 15th and a long weekend.

Vladimir Putin has already congratulated the doctors. But what exactly are we celebrating? Modern domestic medicine is, first of all, a deficit. The term is relevant for the healthcare system today, more than ever.

At the beginning of the year, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko reported on successes in combating the shortage of doctors: over the past two years, the shortage of specialists has decreased from 29,407 people to 23,297 people. And the number of doctors has increased from 541,500 people to 557,918 people.

The dry numbers hide real problems: people cannot get the medical care they need. There is only one therapist working at the Akademichesky District outpatient clinic in Yekaterinburg. Because of this, you have to wait three weeks after making an appointment. With such a time frame, you will either recover on your own or die.

The rate of recruitment of specialists should increase several times! Especially in depressed regions like the Jewish Autonomous Region, Pskov and Kurgan regions, where the lowest provision of doctors is noted.

It looks like we will have to continue to notice the shortage of specialists for a long time: finding people willing to work in the current conditions will be very difficult.

Due to the shortage of personnel, employees of state medical institutions are forced to work to the point of exhaustion. Firstly, they have to work many hours: in the Jewish Autonomous Region, each doctor takes on an average of 1.7 positions. This is an average value: pensioners, due to their capabilities, take on a smaller workload, and younger and stronger doctors toil from morning until night.

And doctors' working hours are not just sitting around in the office. The work schedule is extremely tight, because patients are registered based on established standards of time that can be spent on an appointment.

Doctors will also inevitably have to be congratulated on the ever-growing bureaucracy. Pressure is being exerted on doctors from all sides. According to the idea of ​​health officials, doctors should spend 30-35% of their working time filling out paperwork. This is already quite a lot, but in practice, doctors spend half of their precious time on bureaucratic red tape.

And the situation is not getting any better. For example, they launched the national project "Healthcare", but after it the government demanded constant monitoring of the effectiveness of the projects' implementation. This means that doctors have to fill out new documents instead of treating people.

In addition, doctors have to learn clinical guidelines by heart and pass exams on them. There is little sense in this: surveys show that 80% of doctors only pretend to work on guidelines. Emergency medical workers in comments to a recent text in NI confirm that clinical guidelines do not help to cope with emergency situations.

Thanks to the actions of the federal authorities, doctors are now engaged not so much in treatment, but rather in the functions of a large bureaucratic machine.

However, problems arise not only with officials, but also with immediate management, who cannot provide proper working conditions.

Doctors from the children's hospital of the Tyumen Regional Clinical Hospital No. 2 are leaving due to a conflict with management and unfavorable working conditions. An employee of the Tarsk Central Regional Hospital in the Omsk Region recorded an appeal to the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin , due to a forced transfer to the management of the Omsk Clinical Diagnostic Center. Doctors from the Krasnodar psychiatric dispensary recorded a video appeal to Vladimir Putin with complaints about the incompetence of the management, which is reducing the number of personnel and increasing the bureaucratic burden on the remaining specialists.

In an ideal world, the difficult working conditions of highly qualified specialists should be well paid. But in practice, everything is different. A survey conducted in the spring of 2025 by the professional community "Doctors.RF" shows that 57.5% of doctors' salaries are not enough for food, housing and treatment. At the same time, 78.9% of respondents work more than one position.

As doctors note in comments to a recent NI article, doctors' income situation is still quite good. But mid-level medical personnel, even in intensive care, are often deprived of bonuses - promising specialists quit.

The real plight of medical personnel is combined with the brave reports of officials about salary growth due to a complex income structure. Salaries have been increased, but bonuses and incentive payments may be cut.

Congratulations to the doctors, nurses, orderlies and ambulance workers for surviving in such conditions and not giving up. This is a real feat!