Potemkin hospitals

On January 21, President Vladimir Putin at a meeting on health issues announced the completion of a four-year program to modernize medicine

During the meeting, the president honestly admitted that new expensive equipment was not put into operation everywhere, there are not enough specialists and consumables. The case, however, is not quite so. In fact, regional clinics often do not need either specialists or consumables. For example, many hospitals have purchased equipment for specialized resuscitation care, sometimes costing up to a million euros, or ultrasonic devices with increased resolution. The catch is that the profile of these clinics does not require such equipment, they pass, maybe one or two patients a year, who could be treated under these programs. However, even these two patients have nothing to count on. Doctors who, in order to work on new equipment, in a good way, have to unlearn at some medical institution for several years, take purely formal courses from supplier companies. Since there are no patients, doctors quickly lose their acquired skills, and there is still no one to work on the equipment. Over the past four months I have visited seven cities, and only in one - in St. Petersburg - did the staff roughly understand why they needed new equipment and who they would treat on it. In all other places - in Kaliningrad, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnogorsk near Moscow, Ufa - the doctors simply shrugged their shoulders.

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The money has been spent, the chief doctors have reported, the equipment is standing and gathering dust, but there is still no one and nothing to treat people

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With consumables about the same story. The equipment was bought with federal money allocated under the modernization program, but there was often not enough money for consumables, because the prices were too high: everyone needs to earn money. And an expense set for one patient and one procedure, for example, extracorporeal support for internal organs (kidneys, liver, heart), can cost up to €5,000. Not a single regional hospital can afford this, and there are no such funds in regional budgets .

The whole secret is that the management of the clinics initially did not have the task of buying something useful and somehow using it later. The main thing was to master the huge funds that suddenly poured manna from the federal budget. Now the money has been spent, the chief doctors have reported, the equipment is standing and gathering dust, but there is still no one and nothing to treat people.