Health Minister Vladimír Lengvarský. (source: TASR - Martin Baumann)
The Health Ministry has unveiled the conditions under which hospitals will be divided into five levels as part of the hospital reform.
The reform was approved by lawmakers last year.
“Each hospital will know its scope of institutional care, its technical equipment and staffing,” Health Minister Vladimír Lengvarský (OĽaNO nominee) said on June 20. He added that patients will thus know where exactly they should be hospitalised with their diagnosis and receive the best help.
The decree includes a list of 63 programmes (e.g. urgent medicine and neurosurgery), which each hospital will offer as mandatory, supplementary or optional, and describes 1,460 medical services, the TASR newswire wrote. The ministry’s decree, for example, defines maximum waiting times for surgeries.
The complex material has been submitted to the interdepartmental review, which should end in mid-July.
People should see the first real changes following the reform in early 2024. No hospital will be closed, the ministry said multiple times in the past.
