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© Julia Lazarova
Doctors from Bulgaria and Romania have been fleeing en masse to the West for years. The current coronavirus pandemic has revealed the dire consequences of a severe staff shortage, a Deutsche Welle report said in a Tageshau report.
Hospitals in Bulgaria and Romania have been in crisis for years. But now, along with the explosion of those infected by coronavirus, they fear a real catastrophe. Doctors have gone to the western EU member states and most intensive care units are experiencing a severe shortage of qualified personnel.
Dr. Catalin Dumitrascu stayed. He works in the emergency department in the Romanian city of Alexandria, 80 km southwest of Bucharest. The hospital is the only hospital in the entire county where COVID-19 patients can be treated.
But there are not enough specialists there either, only five of the 12 positions for emergency doctors are filled. “That is to say, we have seven fewer doctors than necessary. Doctors who are not enough. On call, a doctor sees up to 200 patients; this is the reality here,” says Dumitrascu.
Lack of medical equipment too
The main problem: most of Dr. Dumitrascu’s colleagues have left Romania. According to him, this is understandable: “Especially in smaller clinics, the equipment is not enough.”
Romania and Bulgaria, the two poorest countries in the EU, have suffered from severe shortages of doctors for years. Most went to Germany or other EU countries. Since 2007, more than 53,000 doctors have left the two countries.
Retirement-age physicians
Currently, there are only 1,000 intensive care physicians in Romania, a country with a population of 19 million. In the first wave of the pandemic, the president of the Romanian Society for Intensive Care, Professor Dorel Sandek, warned that the situation was dramatic. The current number of intensive care doctors also includes doctors of retirement age, who, however, cannot work in the sector at risk with coronavirus. In other words, in the intensive care units of the clinics, in practice, even fewer than the thousand specialists mentioned work.
The situation in Bulgaria is also dramatic: there are few intensive care doctors there and some of them leave work for days because they become infected. Meanwhile, the Bulgarian Ministry of Health has asked medical students to contact COVID-19 treatment units in hospitals in the last year to help staff as volunteers.
Can compensation help?
To stop the departure of doctors to Europe, Sandek proposes that the EU introduce an obligation to pay compensation. Please understand: the countries that doctors go to must pay a fee to the Romanian state for each specialist they accept. “Such solidarity within the EU should be possible,” he said. According to him, these funds could increase the salaries of doctors.
But physicians should also be encouraged to stay, Dr. Dumitrascu added. Because he is aware that whoever leaves once does not return.
Insufficiently intensive beds
Two thirds of intensive care beds in Romania are occupied and the number of patients needing treatment continues to increase. “We’ve already had a case of a patient waiting for a bed to be vacated to be admitted,” says Dr. Dumitrascu. He assures that the small team of the emergency department of the Alexandria hospital will not withstand the enormous pressure for long.
Two weeks ago, medical personnel started a warning strike. However, the work did not stop so as not to endanger the lives of patients.
