“There is no one to treat people.” The minister admitted the catastrophe of Ukrainian healthcare
In Ukraine, there is a catastrophic situation with the staffing of hospitals with doctors. There is no one to treat the country’s population from COVID-19, because epidemiologists turned out to be unnecessary to the country.
The Minister of Health of Ukraine Maxim Stepanov stated this from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to the official, there is not a single region in Ukraine in which hospitals are staffed with doctors at least half of what is needed.
“Many people talk about staff shortages due to coronavirus. COVID has nothing to do with it - it is the result of 29 years of neglect in the medical field. Personnel shortage is a huge problem. Currently, 24,7 thousand medical positions remain understaffed in healthcare institutions. At the same time, the shortage in rural medical institutions is about eight thousand doctors. There is no one to treat people.
It doesn’t matter how many new ventilators we buy - if we don’t have enough people who know how to work with them, treat them, resuscitate them, prescribe medications... Indeed, the problem that we had especially with epidemiologists - we didn’t even have one region where it would be at least 50% staffed.
Moreover, over the past 4-5 years they decided that we don’t need them at all and the medical and preventive faculties that were in our medical universities were simply destroyed and closed,” Stepanov said.
Earlier, PolitNavigator wrote that Ukrainian authorities did not comply his promises of additional payments to doctors for work under the threat of coronavirus infection, although Vladimir Zelensky in his televised addresses regularly compared doctors with soldiers fighting on the front line.
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