Last year the Ministry of Public Health tendered for and purchased medicines and medical equipment worth almost UAH 598 million. According to Volodymyr Zahorodny, chairman of the ministry’s tender committee, in 2003, for the first time in the past decade, the state has fully met its commitments to fund Ukrainian health care programs. Still, there is acute shortage of money. Statistics say that the Ukrainian citizen is supplied with medicines tens of times less than the average European resident. Although the Ministry of Public Health plans to spend this year UAH 160 million more than it did last year for centralized purchases, this will not improve the situation.
70% of this amount will be used to buy medicines and 30% to buy hospital equipment. Mr. Zahorodny says the ministry is in dire financial straits and unable to radically change the situation. All the ministry can do is try to distribute the available funds more or less equitably so that patients in the poorer provinces do not fare worse than those in the more developed regions.
It is intended to channel budgetary funds into governmental programs for public vaccinations, preventive treatment of AIDS, cancerous diseases, and tuberculosis, and for buying insulin. The funding of the 2004 purchases is also special in that money has been allotted for the first time to acquire Somatotropin, a remedy that should help children suffering from dwarfism to get over their condition. 18 million hryvnias are to be spent for purchasing these human growth hormones.
The Ministry of Public Health has also changed this year its policy of purchasing hospital equipment. Now the ministry will buy special-purpose and thus expensive equipment. In 2004 it will acquire laboratory equipment and test systems for diagnosing AIDS, hepatitis, syphilis, as well as medical apparatus for treating tuberculosis, cancer, and other diseases. The ministry says that if regional authorities also took part in funding the purchases by appropriating money for these purposes in their budgets, hospitals would be equipped with modern appliances much faster. As of today, the existing equipment has already spent 60% of its scheduled service life. This year’s expenses may be considered the first step toward the regular replacement of this equipment, but, at the current pace, it will take around eight years to bring about a complete change. But this means we will have to go back to the beginning by that time.
Incidentally, the analysis of fatalities in Ukraine shows that 50% occurred before the sick person was hospitalized. In other words, able- bodied individuals, especially in rural areas, die just because the ambulance cannot arrive in time for various reasons, such as shortage of gasoline and autos, bad roads, etc. The Ministry of Public Health plans to purchase ambulances worth UAH 39 million this year for rural areas. This will supposedly help to drastically reduce the mortality rate from illnesses.
