Breathing without tolerance

Partisan war on the Niva ban on imported medical equipment ended with a complete "victory" of the government

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed an expanded list of medical devices for which restrictions on the tolerance of foreign products are applied to public procurement. The list is now 140 positions. Among the most painful, in literally, prohibitions are prohibitions on the apparatus of artificial ventilation of the lungs (IVL) and ultrasonic scanners. Breathing and scan will now be domestic products.

Here it should be explained that the story with the ban on imported medical equipment has been holding doctors, charitable organizations, and patient communities for several years. In 2015, in the list approved by the government there were only 67 prohibited positions, the current one, in the updated version, has already 140.

It is difficult to believe that over the past four years, domestic manufacturers have made a high -quality breakthrough. But, and this was obvious from the very beginning of the action of the list under the name “third extra” (it first occurred to the head that the “third extra” government in the chain - the hospital - the patient, was just the most patient), the situation with the ban was not related to healthcare optimization. The “third extra” set the rule - when at least two suppliers of products coming from the EAEU countries, the applications of participants with foreign medical equipment will automatically deviate. In fact, over the past years, the list of medical “forbidding” expanding as on yeast is nothing more than the protection of domestic manufacturers from competition from foreign.

And when there is no competition, there is no guarantee of quality standards. In Russian reality, this is a completely unshakable norm.

But it should be noted that the shaft of anger, falling on that first list was so powerful that the subsequent stages of its expansion stretched for four years. In December 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Trade proposed expanding the “third extra” list by 12 positions, including intraocular lenses, test strips to glucometers, microdisters with iodine-125 for brachytherapy of prostate cancer, endoprostheses and ultrasonic diagnostic cancer.

In July 2018, the department presented another list - it already included apparatus of artificial ventilation, air sterilizers, intraocular pressure tonometers, hemodialysis concentrates, dry -legged, medical beds and otorinoscopes.

In August 2018, representatives of charitable foundations turned to the President of the Russian Federation with a request not to limit the purchase of foreign devices of the Ivl. Their arguments sounded unequivocally: this decision "will jeopardize the life of tens of thousands of citizens of our country and will cause significant damage to the quality and accessibility of medical care in Russia."

The Ministry of Health, in response to this, said that the restriction, allegedly, would not prevent medical institutions from buying import Ilv. However, Tatyana Golikova blocked in October 2018 the promotion of this decision and sent projects for revision at the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Health.

As it turns out now, the revision was a fiction.

As a ban on the purchase of IL will affect the lives of sick people of “New”, the CEO was commented by the CEO of the charity fund for people with bass (lateral amyotrophic sclerosis) “Live Now” Natalya Lugovaya.

Natalia Lugovaya

Director of the Charity Fund for Assisting People with BAS "Live Now"

“Why is this ban on us catastrophic? Domestic respiratory devices are significantly inferior to imported ones that are especially important when it comes to their prolonged use at home. And people with a diagnosis of bass cannot and should not be hostages of resuscitation for many years. But domestic IVLs are often chosen with voltage drops and electricity disabling. They are bulky and not mobile, and that means that a person on Ivl cannot move freely, traveling for a walk, out of town and even swim in the pool. Import equipment can provide all this to a palliative patient. Similar Russian devices do not exist.

If we talk about direct damage to the patient, then even if, according to basic technical characteristics, the domestic apparatus can help the patient breathe, unfortunately, he cannot ensure the quality of life that the patient could count on using imported devices. And if you take into account frequent changes in electricity, especially in the province, then this is a direct threat of life.

According to the statistics of the prevalence of bass, in Russia, about 10-15 thousand people are a disease. And although the bass can proceed very differently, sooner or later almost all patients with a diagnosis of bass have difficulty breathing and there is a need for an invasive or non-invasive lung ventilation apparatus. On the one hand, the state has just taken a large step forward: the right of palliative patients to receive respiratory apparatuses at the expense of the state is enshrined in the new law on palliative care. But there are fears that this achievement will be leveled by the restriction on the public procurement of imported devices. And this, of course, applies to people not only with bass, but also with many other diagnoses - including Children for whom the exact settings of equipment, its reliability and comfort are especially important when using. ”

In addition to Ivl devices, there are many other purchase prohibitions in the list, which will acutely affect the quality of life and treatment of seriously ill people. Experts say that for example, Russian bandages may not fit “butterfly children” suffering from congenital skin pathology, which need special dressings. And the abandonment of systems for neonatal screening will inhibit the early detection of the pathology of newborns.

From the editorial office

Import substitution is such a clumsy and soulless term that, it seems, this is another test sent by Russia by its difficult historical fate. But in fact, any defeat of the people in rights has fathers. And mother.

In the case of the growing nomenclature of the quality of the quality medical products of Western production prohibited in Russia, it must be recalled that a very specific official - Minister Veronika Skvortsova is responsible for healthcare in Russia.

And we turn to it: does the life and health of Russians really have such a lesser value than abstract state - and very specific financial - interests hiding behind them?