The agenda: Support for children with serious diseases, the plan for implementing the Strategy for Comprehensive Child Safety.
Mikhail Mishustin’s opening remarks
Tatyana Golikova’s report on the implementation plan of the Strategy for Comprehensive Child Safety
Excerpts from the transcript:
Meeting with deputy prime ministers on current issues
Mikhail Mishustin: Good morning, colleagues.
Today we will begin with an important topic: support for children with serious diseases.
The President noted that special focus should be placed on the health of our little citizens, with a basis laid in childhood and lasting for many years to come.
The Government is carrying out systematic work to help children with rare and chronic illnesses. In line with the President’s instructions, the Krug Dobra (Circle of Kindness) Foundation has been created. Its priority tasks include organising treatment and rehabilitation, purchasing expensive medical items and medicines, including foreign ones, that have not been registered in Russia yet. In three years, more than 23,000 patients have already received support.
Today we will allocate over 33 billion roubles to expand the list of severe pathologies in a variety of profiles and to purchase the necessary medicines. New unique methods of treatment will also be added.
We hope that the measures adopted will make it possible for more children to get timely treatment and the chance to recuperate from illness.
Another decision concerns children with diabetes. At the meeting with the President, measures to prevent and treat this disease were discussed in detail. The head of state emphasised that people with this diagnosis should have access to all the necessary medicines and medical products. He also gave instructions that an analysis be carried out into the reasons for shortages of certain devices in Russian regions and called for improvements to be made. The government will support regions so that they can purchase a sufficient number of continuous glucose monitoring systems and provide them to children with type 1 diabetes.
We will allocate over one billion roubles for these purposes this year and another 4.1 billion roubles next year.
The rules for the distribution of subsidies under the Combating Diabetes Mellitus federal project have been approved.
Caring for the health and well-being of citizens is one of the priorities of our work, especially when it comes to young people. It is important to provide them with everything they need for their treatment. We will continue to take all necessary measures to achieve this.
The next issue is about children’s safety.
This issue relates primarily to helping parents protect their children from situations where there is a threat to their life or health. It covers a number of other significant areas, from the quality of information surrounding children to crime prevention.
All of them are stipulated by the Strategy for Comprehensive Child Safety, which was developed under the Presidential Executive Order. The Government approved a plan, which includes 76 measures in all priority areas of state policy, and to implement it in the next seven years.
Ms Golikova, please tell us in detail how this plan will be carried out. Please take the floor.
Tatyana Golikova: Mr Mishustin, colleagues. Today, more than 30 million children live in our country. Their safety is one of the top priorities of our work, of the work of the federal and regional authorities, as this is the key to a healthy and safe future for the country.
The plan to implement the Child Safety Strategy involves significant interdepartmental work: 25 federal departments and organisations will participate in it. The plan’s measures are aimed at neutralising all the main threats to the safety of children listed in the strategy and, on this basis, are grouped into five areas: protecting children, strengthening the well-being of families with children; developing modern safe infrastructure for children; preventing crimes committed by and against minors; strengthening the institution of the family; and creating a safe information environment for children.
We pay special attention to the children’s goods industry: the quality of games, books, films, and everything that forms value guidelines and a culture of safe behaviour.
For the first time, an integrated approach has been applied to child safety, focusing not only on the physical security of children, but also on the economic, information, cultural and psychological components of the term “safety.”
One of the plan’s priority areas is to develop habits of safe behaviour and a healthy lifestyle in parents and children, and to support traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, especially family values.
I would like to note that we still have positive dynamics in terms of indicators that characterise the reduction in the number of identified orphans and children left without parental care, and their family structure. In 2022, there were 3.2 percent fewer such children than in 2021. Last year, the number of children with both or a single parent deprived of parental rights decreased by 2.2 percent, and the number of children taken away from their parents due to an immediate threat to their life or health, decreased by 12.6 percent.
The draft plan includes not only activities that have previously been carried out systematically and have proven themselves, but also a number of new ones, including the normative consolidation of some prohibitive measures – this concerns the dissemination of illegal information, including via the internet –
the development of national and interstate standards, which establish requirements for goods and services for children. The drafted plan also involves support for public initiatives aimed at identifying potentially dangerous, unsafe and abandoned facilities in order to limit access to such facilities for children.
Based on our plan, the regions will develop regional plans to implement comprehensive strategic and other programme documents to ensure children’s safety. I would like to stress that we all have the same goals: to maintain the health of and protect and ensure the interests of children and their families in all spheres of life.
Last week, the President adopted an executive order declaring 2024 the Year of the Family, and the Government has already been working towards this.
Mikhail Mishustin: Thank you, Ms Golikova. It is very important to closely monitor the implementation of this plan and all its activities. After all, each of them is aimed at protecting the health and interests of our children, as well as at their intellectual, creative, physical and generally harmonious development.
