Doctors do not sow and do not reap – Newspaper Kommersant No. 190 (7391) of 10/13/2022

According to the Ministry of Health, the shortage of medical workers in Russian healthcare is less than 100 thousand people in an industry that employs 2.5 million people, but it is recorded in most Russian regions. Over the past year, the situation with doctors has worsened a little, with medical staff it has improved significantly.

In 2021, most regions of Russia recorded a shortage of doctors, middle and junior medical personnel, based on the standards established by the Ministry of Health for the availability of these personnel in public hospitals and clinics. Such data in the updated draft of the state program “Health Development” in the section “Assessment of the current state of the health of citizens” is provided by the Ministry of Health, the draft document was published yesterday on the portal regulatiton.gov.ru.

As follows from the text of the document, last year there was a shortage of 26.4 thousand doctors in the state health care of the Russian Federation. Over the year, the shortage of medical personnel has grown, since in 2020, as follows from the previous version of the state program, its figure was almost 4 thousand people lower. It also turned out to be higher than the indicator of the number of doctors employed in public health in the last year before the coronavirus pandemic — as Deputy Health Minister Tatyana Semenova said in 2019, then the system lacked 25.2 thousand specialists. The dynamics of the number of middle and junior medical staff over the same period looked different – at the end of 2021, according to the Ministry of Health, their shortage was only 58.2 thousand people, while last year this figure was twice as much (122 thousand people ). A similar indicator of the shortage of medical staff was before the pandemic – then it was 130.6 thousand people. Based on data from the Ministry of Health, the shortage of doctors decreased in the first year of the spread of coronavirus, and the shortage of medical staff in the second.

Probably, the main reason for the decrease in the deficit of various categories of health workers was the introduction by the government of additional payments to those who were involved in the treatment and care of patients with coronavirus – we recall that since the beginning of 2020, the federal budget has subsidized their salaries, first through the regional ministries of health, and then through the Social Insurance Fund ( see Kommersant dated October 26, 2021 for details). Some could remain working in the healthcare system even after the reduction in the number of hospitals with “red zones”. The re-increase in the shortage of doctors in 2021, in turn, may be due to “secondary” competition for them from private clinics that began to provide services for the treatment of coronavirus patients later than state hospitals.

Assessing the prospects, the sectoral trade unions differed in assessing the size of a possible shortage of specialists. Mikhail Androchnikov, Deputy Chairman of the Trade Union of Healthcare Workers of the Russian Federation (part of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions), notes that in recent years the Ministry of Health has managed to increase the enrollment of applicants to medical universities and, thanks to this, will receive an influx of young specialists in the next three to five years. At the same time, Andrey Konoval, head of the Deystviye medical workers’ trade union, says that the partial mobilization announced at the end of September could negatively affect the staffing of the healthcare system. “So far, we know about isolated cases of conscription of doctors, but the situation can change unpredictably,” he notes. So, according to him, from individual medical institutions in some regions – Crimea, Smolensk and Tver regions – they began to receive signals that medical workers were forbidden to go on vacation from October or November. Perhaps, in this way, regional health systems are preparing for the fact that physicians will begin to be drafted into the armed forces more actively. At the same time, the head of the Ministry of Health, Mikhail Murashko, has already announced that the department will work on a reservation system for medical workers providing emergency and planned assistance so as not to reduce the amount of treatment available to Russians.

Anastasia Manuylova