Medical on-call reform in Hungary: An inefficient solution to the primary health care system
The current form of the Hungarian general practitioner (‘GP’) system is unsustainable, as it is still unable to perform its role as a gatekeeper. Doctors working as retirees, the irreplaceable human resources, unorganized patient pathways, increasing workload, and untapped professional capacity result in a hospital-centric health care system while outpatient and inpatient clinics are unable to perform their original function, and increasing waiting times in all sectors of the sector weaken patients’ confidence in healthcare. On the one hand, these problems raise dilemmas about the inefficient use of public money, on the other hand, the need for an organized integration of private health into the current structure. The state is also working to reduce the growing burden on GPs, however, a lack of experience often gives rise to solutions that tend to escalate the current situation. Read more… (Máté Sándor Deák – Dóra Lovas)
For a long time the Belarusian authorities characterized their national and subnational budgets with a welfare orientation. This brief note focuses on two questions: (i) what tendencies of social budgetary policy can be observed in the time of economic recession and (ii) how consistent was the welfare orientation of the central and local budgets in practice.