The online meeting participants discussed, in particular, legal regulation of labour relations in 2020, as well as improving the provision of medicines.
Opening remarks by Mikhail Mishustin:
Meeting of the Presidium of the Government Coordination Council to control the incidence of the novel coronavirus infection in the Russian Federation
Good afternoon, colleagues. The situation with the coronavirus has stabilised markedly over the past several days. The number of new cases continues to decline, with 7,400 new cases nationwide and 1,081 new cases in Moscow over the past 24 hours. Nevertheless, testing for COVID-19 continues unabated. Over 17 million tests have been performed to date.
Because of the restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic the Government adopted special labour relations regulations in 2020. I signed a resolution that provides workers with additional guarantees and greater flexibility in dealing with a variety of issues.
Please note that timely payment of wages in accordance with the legislation is our top priority. Those who work in the Far North are entitled to receive, in 2021, employer’s reimbursement for travel and luggage expenses incurred en route to the place of vacation and back, if the employee didn’t use it during the period of restrictive measures.
Instances have also been identified when employees may keep the compensation they received in 2020 but didn’t have the chance to use because of the coronavirus pandemic. We are talking about instances where the carrier extended the validity of the tickets for next year or didn’t recompense the employee for them.
Colleagues, many of us may have been in a situation where we were given one kind of medication in hospitals, but, at discharge, we had similar medications by other manufacturers prescribed to us that may not be as effective. There’s need for affordable, high quality and, occasionally, even completely innovative medicines if we want to improve the effectiveness of medical care. Of course, there’s need for modern regulations that make it possible to address doctors and patients’ problems with more flexibility.
Meeting of the Presidium of the Government Coordination Council to control the incidence of the novel coronavirus infection in the Russian Federation
Meeting of the Presidium of the Government Coordination Council to control the incidence of the novel coronavirus infection in the Russian Federation
I will sign a Government resolution on making corresponding adjustments to the current regulations in this sphere. In particular, patients will continue to receive treatment on an outpatient basis with the same medication that was used when they were in hospital. This will allow the patients to stick to the treatment plan that has proved to be effective after they have been discharged from hospital.
In addition, we are working to improve the procedure for drafting the List of Medicines procured in accordance with their trade names. We have made it open so that the questions about including (or excluding) medications sold at subsidised prices in/from the list can be discussed by a greater number of specialists with account taken of the latest pharmaceutical advances and approaches to treating serious diseases. This is an important step. We hope it will make treatment more effective.
