The Minister of Health speaks to the Romanians about one of the biggest problems faced by millions of people during the Coronavirus pandemic, more precisely the lack of access to medicine due to the lack of outpatient clinics where they can go to be evaluated and treated.
The Minister of Health says that for the future he is trying to introduce the idea of preventive medicine in Romania by training both doctors and patients, and possibly also offering incentives to bring people to doctors and constantly check their health status.
"During the pandemic, we reached 2 million hospitalizations in the course of a year, because access to health was limited. Unfortunately, we did not have an ambulatory system to compensate for this difficulty during the pandemic, and we woke up with a huge mortality.
The difference in 2021 between birth and mortality was a negative increase of almost 100.000 people, and this is also due to the difficult access to health services, we must recognize this, because the mortality caused by the infection with the new Coronavirus was certainly important , but it does not justify a general mortality as high as was recorded in 2020 and 2021.
This is the perspective that I and many of the colleagues I work with at the ministry have. I hope that we will be able to bring these topics into public debate, and start an information and education campaign, both for health professionals and the population. However, there must be incentives of a financial nature, many times, to stimulate this type of behavior, to reward the prevention of diseases, and even less to reward their late treatment, or even in terminal stages.
Of course they must be solved, these problems, and for these patients, but we must encourage the medical staff to develop these preventive medical services. We are now working on the national health strategy for the next 9 years, there is a ministry working group that created this draft of the strategy.
There is now also a public debate, we also incorporate the ideas of colleagues from the country. Obviously, non-communicable diseases represent, if you like, the silent epidemic, because they affect many people, and they seriously affect the quality of life of these people. Starting from protocols, to guidelines, continuing with registries for the main non-communicable diseases, we can design the necessary interventions to reduce the impact of these diseases."
