Minister of Education and Science Dmitry Livanov, Minister of Healthcare Veronika Skvortsova and Minister of Labour and Social Security Maxim Topilin took part in the teleconference in the Situations Centre of the Russian Government. Among the issues discussed were plans to raise wages in pre-school education in 2013 to the average regional wage level in education, measures to curb waiting lists to pre-school childcare centres, the proposal to introduce payment for the third child in a family, prospects for developing a network of high-tech medical centres and the process of implementing healthcare modernisation programmes.
During the discussion of the problem of waiting lists for admitting children to childcare centres, Dmitry Livanov said, in part, that due to measures that have been taken, the existing waiting lists of three to seven-year-old children in the country will decrease by 65.6% as early as this year. The Minister named St Petersburg, and the Vologda and Pskov regions as positive examples. However, according to him, some regions, such as the Jewish Autonomous Area, Khakassia, the Volgograd Region, Ingushetia and Dagestan are lagging considerably behind schedule. The situation in the Moscow Region remains tense, where waiting lists may have about 50 thousand children by September 1. In this regard, Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets demanded that Moscow Region authorities conduct the maximum possible revisions of existing opportunities for decreasing waiting lists. While addressing all the regions, Olga Golodets noted that the authorities should "walk around" all the premises available to find extra places for children. "I visited a region where half of a kindergarten was being leased. And the authorities report problems with waiting lists," said the Deputy Prime Minister.
Olga Golodets instructed the regions to review additional possibilities for solving this problem by August 15.
