Named the causes of the catastrophic situation with the lack of paramedics in Russia

The Buryat village of Naushki has already been left without affordable medical care

Today, paramedics celebrate their professional holiday in Russia. Which, alas, every year in the country becomes less and less. In some regions, this deficit is already catastrophic. So, according to telegram channels, in the Buryat urban-type settlement of Naushki, whose population is only about 2.5 thousand people, the last paramedic is leaving the other day.

Starting from November 2022, the third paramedic left the medical aid station, which served the residents of the village of Naushki. The first two dropped out according to the age criterion – they retired. The third one wrote a statement on his own – colleagues from neighboring settlements say that the reason was emotional and professional burnout. A fairly common story that has been happening to doctors since the beginning of the pandemic.

While the local medical aid station works only during the day, the last paramedic left at work accepts residents – however, he has already announced that he will only be there until the end of February. If something happens at night, you have to call an ambulance from the city of Kyakhta, located at a distance of 30 kilometers from Naushki. The roads here are poor, and if the weather is bad, the journey takes at least an hour. And emergencies happen often: there are a lot of old people, children in the village, there are enterprises with difficult working conditions.

Well, starting from March, there will simply be no one to promptly provide medical assistance to local residents. People really hope that doctors from neighboring regions will come to work for them, but they also have a shortage of personnel.

…At the end of October, the employment service HeadHunter conducted an analysis of the situation with medical personnel in the regions. According to him, the number of vacancies in the medical field in just a month (from the end of September 2022 to the end of October) has grown rapidly – by 42%. The most prosperous situation from this point of view is in Moscow and the Moscow region (here the number of Medvakans increased by 27% and 26%, respectively). But in the Sverdlovsk region, the growth was 40%, in the Samara region – 46%, in the Leningrad region – by 107%. And this is not the limit. The worst situation is in sparsely populated regions. In the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the need for medical workers over the specified period increased by 422%, in the Jewish Autonomous Region – by 290%, in the Kamchatka Territory – by 276%.

In 2021, according to one specialized medical journal, the shortage of medical specialists exceeded 90,000 in the outpatient department alone. In the villages at that time there were not enough about 5,000 doctors and 2,000 paramedics.

The shortage of health workers has been known for a long time. For example, according to regulatory documents, an ambulance team should consist of two doctors. But in many regions, one paramedic is forced to respond to calls. The trade union clarifies that the shortage of SMP workers is sometimes hidden “due to the mass work of part-time paramedics.” Marina Minasyan, an ambulance paramedic at the Bogotol Interdistrict Hospital (Krasnoyarsk Territory), clarifies that there was a shortage of personnel before, but the coronavirus pandemic has made the problem more acute.