Mikhail Mishustin: “The Government is allocating funds to establish mobile outreach medical teams. Subsidies will be given tor medical institutes and clinics that have serious research schools and extensive practices. There are 32 of them in the country. Medical workers in the regions will receive timely consultative and methodological assistance. This will make it possible to reduce the load on regional health systems.”
Excerpts from the transcript:
Mikhail Mishustin: Good afternoon, colleagues.
We are seeing that the load on regional healthcare systems is growing. Medical workers have a particularly hard time in small cities with an acute shortage of personnel. Taking care of coronavirus patients, doctors, paramedics, and nurses are also falling ill. And of course, people still need their planned medical exams and regular consultations with specialists.
To help the regions provide quality healthcare services to the people, the Government is allocating funds for creating outreach mobile medical teams and organising their work. Medical workers in the regions will receive timely consultative and methodological assistance, and government-allocated subsidies will also be distributed to medical institutes and clinics with serious research schools and extensive practice. There are 32 of them in the country. Some of them, for instance, the Pirogov Centre or the National Medical Research Centre of Cardiology at the Health Ministry are well known in the country. Teams will be formed from the professionals at these organisations. They will go to the regions to help treat coronavirus patients and also consult patients on other diseases to make up for the shortage of doctors in narrow specialties. This will help reduce the load on regional healthcare systems, which is particularly heavy during the coronavirus pandemic.
We hope that owing to these measures, people will be helped more promptly and that chronic patients will be protected against serious complications in the future.
The Government is expanding bed availability for coronavirus patients. Today, this will be done in two regions – the Samara and the Orenburg regions.
Starting today, almost 200 beds will be deployed at the Academician Fyodorov Centre to help patients in the Orenburg Region.
The same number of beds will be converted for coronavirus patients at Samara State Medical University. Local coronavirus patients began to receive treatment there as early as the spring.
I would like to draw the attention of the regional governors to the need to continuously maintain at least a 20 percent capacity of free bed space, and to ensure access to the necessary medications and their timely procurement at the federal level.
People must receive timely help both at home and in outpatient clinics, and of course, in hospitals. If it is necessary to provide additional transport for general practitioners and ambulance teams, it is appropriate and necessary to use the unused autos of the government agencies, as well as public-funded and professional car services. Let me recall that the Government has already allotted over 15 billion roubles to the regions for this purpose.
It is also necessary to reduce, as much as possible, the response times to emergency calls. To achieve this, it is essential to improve the call centres to enable each patient to receive the necessary consultation on time. Involve volunteers, including psychologists in this work. In many regions they are already working well under the ‘We are Together’ project.
Now the timeliness and speed of decision-making are key criteria for assessing the performance of the authorities. Unfortunately, in many regions decisions are still made too slowly. This is unacceptable today. I would like to ask the regional governors to consider these recommendations in their work.
The Government continues supporting social workers that assist coronavirus patients in hospitals. These are homes for the elderly and other social service institutions where people live permanently. We will send over 2.5 billion roubles for payments to the workers of such homes and hospitals through the end of the year.
