F.S.S.R. – Arguments and solutions for the romanian healthcare system reform

“Health Solidarity” Federation from Romania (F.S.S.R. - Federația ”Solidaritatea Sanitară” din România), a federative trade union organization in health sector, affiliated to CNS Cartel Alfa confederation, is participating for more than six months in a comprehensive process of reconstruction of Romanian healthcare system.

In these negociations with the representatives of the Romanian Health Ministry, F.S.S.R. is trying a different approach in relation to all that trade union leverages to obtain workers’ rights means , such as building negotiating positions based on scientific arguments and sociological studies on the main problems of healthcare employees, studies developed through The “Solidarity” Social Research and Development Center (Centrul de Cercetare și Dezvoltare Socială Solidaritatea). It is an approach that our organization considers to be the only effective, at least on short and medium, under the essential changes in trade union environment brought by the legislative changes in 2009, when the individual and collective rights, as well as the trade union rights, have entered an area of limitation and constraint.

F.S.S.R., represented by the president Mr. Viorel Rotilă, requested the Ministry of Health, regarding the three bills proposed for public debate starting with 1st of August, 2013 – the remuneration, the hospital status and the employees’ civil liability – to accept some principles that should provide: the drafting of a new remuneration law starting from at least the current salary level, as well as the introduction of the performance-related salary; the drafting of new hospital status law starting from the principle of hospital and healthcare personnel exclusion from the categories of the budgetary units, respectively the budgetary employees; the introduction of the system’s liability in the new law on employees’ civil liability, considering that at present, in most situations, responsible in cases of malpractice is considered to be the employee, the system not taking any blame for the errors that it generates.

During the last meeting from 18th of July, 2013, of the working group at the Ministry of Health level for the remuneration law drafting, F.S.S.R. is asking the Ministry of Health not to miss this opportunity of rebuilding the legislation on healthcare system remuneration, and to take into account the implementation of this pilot project for all public healthcare units personnel categories. All legislative proposals must be supported, of course, by a fair system funding – an old problem of Romanian healthcare, otherwise we can only discuss of a system rotation without influences on the quality of the medical act and on the professional life of healthcare employees.

Although the bills entered the public debate in a different form than what was negotiated in the working groups framework, we still have the hope that they will finally contain sufficient proposals of F.S.S.R., so that we can talk about a real reconstruction of Romanian healthcare system.

Article provided by the F.S.S.R