Paid medical services not to be cancelled

The Ministry of healthcare claims that all paid medical services in Belarus were cancelled long ago. But polyclinics continue working as usual. There are rumours that all paid services may soon be forbidden.
The reason for those rumours was the public prosecutor’s check-up of medical institutions. It discovered some violation of sanitary norms and rules of accommodation of patients in hospitals.

Will there be any paid medical services in our country? The head of the department of private enterprise of the Ministry of Healthcare Piotr Tsihanchuk says:

“There will be paid services. There is a regulation of the Council of Ministers. There are and there will be. Nobody has cancelled them. There was some inaccuracy about the services. Maybe there were some problems with refrigerators, TV-sets, microwaves, maybe… Maybe there was something else.

This problem has not been solved yet. We have suspended paid services to hold a meeting. People will be informed about everything. We will make speeches and they will also be given this opportunity. And paid services will remain”.

Moreover, the fact that paid services were allowed led to the fact that some medical institutions illegally increased their number. The press-secretary of the Republican Office of Public Prosecutor Alyaksey Taranau says:

“The check-up discovered some violation of the rules of rendering paid medical services. People were illegally made to pay for accommodation in hospitals and meals. That is why an appeal to the Minister of Healthcare has been drawn up”.

The ministry informed ERB that all the violations have been liquidated. ERB phoned a number of Minsk polyclinics to learn the details. It turned out that medical institutions were rendering paid medical services as usual.

The Leninski District polyclinic’s chief accountant Lyudmіla Sokal got to know about the fact that rendering of paid services had been suspended only from ERB:

“It’s the first time I hear it. There must have been some order to inform us about it. It is not enough to hear about it. There must be an official order to suspend paid medical services”.

They already tried to “cut down” paid medical services in state medical institutions in 2005. Many services have moved to private clinics then. It was planned to create a multiple-discipline state polyclinic.

But is has remained a plan. A number of paid medical services are rendered in state polyclinics. Lyudmіla Sokal continues:

“We have a number of them; there is a price list: subspecialty consultations, ultrasonic scanning, gynaecology… Everything you may need”.

It seems that healthcare will always feel the need of paid medical services – they will be popular
 regardless of the fact where they will be rendered and whether they will be legal or not.